Excel Beginners

Keyboard Shortcuts: Step 4 To Mastering Spreadsheets

THERE ARE ALWAYS ALTERNATE WAYS TO DO THINGS

ALT Shortcuts

In this last section you will be shown shortcuts with are comprised almost entirely of Excel’s ALT shortcuts. We call them this as they all start by pressing the ALT key on its own, and are essentially quicker ways to navigate the different tabs of the ribbon to access the tools and resources you already use.

You will also be shown how to determine the shortcut path for any tool in the Excel ribbon yourself so that you can create your own shortcut helper best suited to your personal workload and use cases!

Getting started with ALT shortcuts

Before jumping into the first shortcut, in this section you will need to read the shortcuts a little differently, instead of holding down the ALT key like we have been doing in previous sections, this time you will simply press the ALT key once, and every key after that will be pressed one after the other with no need to hold any keys down. Pressing the ALT key once, if done correctly, should result in something similar to these grey squares with letters or numbers appearing in the Excel ribbon.

These letters or numbers in grey boxes are the “guides” for navigating ALT shortcuts. Each press of a displayed letter or number will take you further into each segment of the menu. As an example, based on the picture above, after pressing the ALT key if you press the F key it will navigate you to the File tab of Excel. If you wanted to print your current file, you could expand upon that by using the shortcut ALT, F, P, P.

One of the great things about an ALT shortcut is that they remain the same no matter which ribbon tab you have active when you first press the ALT key*. This makes them extremely versatile, and one of the ways power users can expertly navigate their files without their fingers ever leaving the keyboard.

*The only exception to this is if you are in the File tab, as it has a specific window layout which is not consistent with the rest of Excel

General Use ALT Shortcuts

Here are 5 of the ALT shortcuts for some of the most used tools within Excel that have not already been covered by a standard shortcut!

1. Insert a Pivot Table (With data from a table/range)

ALT, N, V, T

2. Merge and center selected cells (keeping only the value in the top-left cell)

ALT, H, M, C

3. Turn on / off wrapping text within the selected range of cells

ALT, H, W

4. Freeze panes on the currently active cell (the same shortcut can also turn off freeze panes)

ALT, W, F, F

5. Remove duplicate values from selected cells

ALT, A, M

These are just some of the many tools you can access without leaving your keyboard. As you practice these, look to see what other letter / number combinations there are for the tools that you use most often in Excel! You would be surprised by just how quick and easy it can be to replace reaching over to your mouse with a few keystrokes and the ALT key.