Excel Keyboard Shortcuts

When you are first getting used to Excel you will probably be focused on just getting your task done rather
than learning how to work more efficiently. However, when you are ready to learn about the Excel keyboard
shortcuts this lesson will teach you the most important and useful Excel shortcuts currently available.

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The benefits of using a keyboard shortcut are twofold:

 It is quicker to keep your hand on the keyboard then shift from keyboard to mouse to keyboard
 You will experience less stress on your muscles if you shift your hands less

We have divided the keyboard shortcuts into related areas. This way you can focus on learning a group of
shortcuts at a time, rather than all at once!

Shortcut Help: Combination keyboard shortcuts, those that have a plus (i.e. Ctrl + S), require that you
hold the first key (Control) then press the second key (S) while still holding down the first key.

Excel Shortcuts: Files

This small group of shortcuts is useful for opening, closing and saving your Excel workbooks.

 Ctrl+S: Save your Excel workbook

 Ctrl+O: Open an existing Excel workbook
 Ctrl+N: Create a new Excel workbook

Excel Shortcuts: Editing

These are common shortcuts you will use to edit your Excel workbook. Our favorite shortcut in this list is,
quite obviously, Ctrl+Z.

 Ctrl+C: Copy the current selection to the clipboard. After you copy something, you can paste it with the
paste shortcut.
 Ctrl+V: Paste the current item from the clipboard.
 Ctrl+X: Cut the current selection and place it on the clipboard, which can be pasted. The difference
between cut and copy is that cut will delete your selection, while copy will not.

 Ctrl+Z: Undo your last change. This is can be repeated to remove again and again to undo many
changes.
 Ctrl+Y: Redo your last Undo. This only is available if you have just issued an Undo command.

 Backspace: Deletes the current cell and enters edit mode for that cell. This will only delete one cell
and not a selection.
 Delete: Deletes the current selection. Use the delete key when you want to delete more than one cell
at a time.

Excel Shortcuts: Getting Around

These shortcuts will help you move around your Excel workbooks and worksheets with great ease!
  Page Up: Move one page up in your worksheet
 Page Down: Move one page down in your worksheet. Note: The number of rows moved in both page
up and page down depend on how many rows are currently displayed. The more rows you have
displayed the greater amount the row jump will be when you do a page up/down.
 Ctrl+Home: Move to the beginning of your worksheet
 Ctrl+End: Move to the end of your worksheet

 Tab: Move right one column

 Shift+Tab: Move left one column

 Ctrl+Page Up: Go back one worksheet

 Ctrl+Page Down: Go forward one worksheet. Note: If you are not using multiple worksheets in your
workbook you will probably not use this shortcut!

Excel Shortcuts: Formatting

These shortcuts will help you quickly format your data.

 Ctrl+B: Toggles bold on and off for your selection

 Ctrl+I: Toggles italic on and off for your selection
 Ctrl+U: Toggles underline on and off for your selection

 Ctrl+1: Opens up the Format Cell popup

Excel Shortcuts: Menu

 These shortcuts allow you to active the various options on the menu bar without have to mouse-click them.
Note: These shortcuts use Alt as their combination key.

 Alt+F: Accesses the File menu

 Alt+E: Accesses the Edit menu
 Alt+V: Accesses the View menu
 Alt+I: Accesses the Insert menu
 Alt+T: Accesses the Tools menu
 Alt+D: Accesses the Data menu
 Alt+W: Accesses the Window menu
 Alt+H: Accesses the Help menu

After you have used one of these shortcuts you can use the arrow keys to navigate the menu choices and
use the Enter key to select a choice.

Excel Shortcuts: Selecting

These shortcuts help you to quickly select items in your Excel file in various ways.

 Shift+Spacebar: Select the current Row

 Ctrl+Spacebar: Select the current column
 Ctrl+A: Select All, will select everything on the current worksheet. This is most often used in
conjunction with the copy shortcut.

Excel Shortcuts: Miscellaneous

And the two black sheep of the shortcut essentials:

 F1: Opens up the quick help feature

 Ctrl+P: Print your worksheet

 Go Back

 Continue

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Sorting in Excel lets you easily reorder your data based on the type of sorting that you Link to Tizag
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With the data enetered you are now ready to begin sorting in Excel.

Excel Sorting: Alphabetical Order (Ascending)

The most common type of sorting, and one that is applicable to our situation, is
alphabetical ordering. This kind of ordering places the cells that start with the early letters of
the alphabet (a, b, c...) at the top and the later letters (t, u, v...) at the bottom of the list.

1. First we need to select all the data so we can begin to sort it. Because each name
has a corresponding score we need to select both columns to preserve the
students' correct scores.
2. Left-click and hold on cell A1 then drag down-right to cell B10 to highlight all the
data for sorting! Your spreadsheet should look like this:
 3. Left-click the "sort ascending" button, located near the top, on the shortcut bar (it
has a blue A on top and a red Z on bottom with a downward pointing arrow).

4. Your spreadsheet should now be sorted.

Notice that your column titles (Name and Score) have not been included for sorting
because Excel is smart enough to know that you do not want these special cells (A1 and
B1) included.

Reverse Alphabetical Order (Descending)

The steps for reverse alphabetical order are the same as above, except that you need
to click the "sort descending" button instead.

1. Select the data you wish to sort (left-click in cell A1 and drag down-right to B10)
 2. Left-click the "sort descending" button, located near the top, on the shortcut bar (it
has a red Z on top and a blue A on bottom downward pointing arrow).

3. Your spreadsheet should now be sorted in reverse alphabetical order.

Numerical Ordering
If you wanted to instead sort the homework assignments by highest to lowest score you
would follow these steps to use Excel's numeric sorting. The only difference between this
example and our previous examples is which column you start your selection from, so pay
close attention to the first step!

1. Left-click cell B1 and drag down-left to cell A10

 2. Left-click the "sort descending" button, located near the top, on the shortcut bar (it
has a red Z on top and a blue A on bottom with a downward pointing arrow).

3. Your Excel data should now look like:

Congratulations, you now know how to sort columns of both numbers and words in
Excel!

Generic Formatting in Excel

Sometimes you don't have the data set up nice and orderly like our above examples,
which might make using Excel's quick sort buttons to fall flat on their face when attempting
to sort your data. If you would like to access Excel's manual, and much more powerful,
sorting option simply select "Data < Sort..." from the menu bar.

Note: Be sure that you select your data before going to the manual sorting feature. This
will let Excel know which data you want to sort.
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An If Statement is used in Excel to do certain actions only if something is true. For Link to Tizag
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The IF function needs to have some sort of comparison to operate properly. A very
ct Us common type of comparison is greater/less than (>/<). These math symbols can be used to
form logical expressions like "A2 < 40000", which in English means "Cell A2 is less than
40000".

Now that logical expression can be either true or false and the IF function lets you do
something for each result. In this little example we will be making our IF function print out
something our boss might say.
 Your excel spreadsheet should look like this:

Excel - IF Function's 3 Parts

The IF function has three parts:

1. The comparison you will be doing. We are using A2 < 40000

2. What to do if the If statement is true
3. What to do if the If statement is false

If all that information is confusing to you, don't worry, Excel has a built in wizard to help
you make your own If functions.

1. Go to the Insert menu and choose Function

2. Select the Logical functions from the drop down selector

3. Choose the IF function and click OK

4.

5. Put "A2<40000" as the logical expression

6. Put "We are losing money?" as the true value
7. Put "We are making money!" as the false value
 8. Press OK

Because our sales were only $30,000 the if statement should be printing out "We are
losing money?"

This isn't good at all, we're going to get fired!

Make Some Accounting Adjustments

Let's make some small accounting changes and up that sales figure to $50,000 and
see what the IF function prints out.

Ah that is much better, now we're making money!

Notice that when the value of A2 was $30,000 it was less than $40,000 and our IF
function was set to print out "We are losing money?" when A2 was less than 40,0000.
However, when we changed the value of A2 to $50,000 the IF statement was now false and
it printed out "We are making money!"

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Drop Down Preparation

Imagine that we are creating an Excel spreadsheet to document our purchases from
the grocery store. For each purchase we want to mark down the name of the food and the
type of the food.

The way a drop down list works in Excel is that it takes values from some place on your
spreadsheet and uses them to populate the options in the list. Lucky for us, the type of food
is a perfect opportunity to use a drop down list!

In cells A1 through A7 enter the type of food that will be used for the drop down list.

Creating a Drop Down List

Now that we have a source for our drop down list, we can create a begin to create our
drop down.

1. Select cells D2 though D20 (We will be creating a drown down list for each cell in
this range)
 2. Click the Data menu and select Validation
3. Choose List from the Allow drop down menu

4. Click the Source button that appears to the right of the textfield

5. Select our source cells A1 though A7

6. Press Enter and Click OK

Testing Your Drop Down

All of your cells in the Type column should now have a drop down list. To test to see if
your drop down works, click on cell D2 and then click on the downward facing arrow and
see if all the types of food are available.

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This is a very simple file and only contains the text "this workbook" in cell A1. Save this
file as link1.xls.

Now let's make link2.xls.

This worksheet only has one data entry in C1 with the value "has a link". Save this file
as link2.xls in the same directory as link1.xls.

Excel Linking: The Reference

As you can probably tell, we are going to link to the information in our second file so
that our first file has the line "this workbook has a link". The actual link reference is quite
complicated looking, so please take your time to understand each component of the Excel
Link.

There are three major parts that a link must have to be valid:

1. Workbook: This is the filename of your Excel document.

2. Worksheet: This is the worksheet name of your Excel sheet. The default name
would be Sheet1.
3. Cells: The cell(s) which are going to be linked to.

These three parts combine to make a pretty ugly looking blob of text. Using the general
terms from above, this is how a generic link would look.

 =[Workbook.xls]Worksheet!Cells

For our example, the Workbook is link2.xls, the Worksheet is Sheet1 and the cell is C1.
Our link would then be:

1. =[link2.xls]Sheet1!C1
2. Enter this link into cell C1 of link1.xls and hit Return.

3. Your link1.xls file should now properly link to your second file to display "this
workbook has a link".
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This link is subject to change, so please Contact Us if it stops working.

Download your FREE Excel 2003 Viewer from microsoft.com.

I Already have Excel. Why is this Useful?

If you already purchased Excel, you can still make use out of this free viewer. Do you
have employees in your company who don't work in Excel, but need to view or print it from
time to time? Maybe you Excel documents on your company's internet network, but not
everyone has their own copy of Excel.

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