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One of the program managers on my team (Charlie) has put together a list of 214 keyboard shortcuts available in Excel. While it isn’t exhaustive (for example, it doesn’t cover shortcuts available in dialogs), I find it a useful presentation of the shortcuts that are available when performing basic editing in Excel, so I thought I would share it with you. If you click the picture below, you will access a PDF file which you can download and print. (The PDF was generated by a recent build of Microsoft Excel 2007). The items in orange are new to Excel 2007 (there may be a few more coming too).
(Click to save)
The other thing I wanted to do today was to evangelize a few of my favourites, some of which are more esoteric than others. Here are some pretty self-explanatory ones that come in pretty handy once you know them (mostly shortcuts to dialogs). There are many others in this category in the list.
Next, there are a lot of commands to do common things you do all the time in Excel. Here are some I use frequently.
Then, there are a whole group that relate to selection in Excel – selecting ranges, navigating selection, etc. By way of background, Excel has a few selection “modes” which you can turn on and off. “Extend selection mode”, when turned on, simply expands selection from the active cell when you move around using the mouse or keyboard. “Add selection mode” adds to existing selection when you select cells (using either the mouse or toggling on “Extent selection mode”). These are handy for keyboard-intensive users. Here are some examples.
On to the more esoteric items. Here is one that is less-frequently-used since we added formula tooltips (the tooltips that show the arguments of a formula as you type), but it can still come in handy.
And here are a couple of my true favourites which allow you to quickly navigate the “calculation chain” in Excel.
Finally, here are some that allow you to quickly select unequal values when working with rows of data.
For folks that are looking for an even more exhaustive list, you might want to check out the Office Online list of Excel Keyboard Shortcuts, or a list maintained by David McRitchie. There are lots of other lists available too; those are just two others that I am familiar with.
PS Improved the list based on some reader feedback
Comments: (11) Collapse
Who can possibly remember them all?
Shift + Ctrl + A - Insert arguments in formula
That comes in handy for functions in the ATP.
You're conflating keyboard users with users of keyboard shortcuts. Many (most?) keyboard users tend to use the menus rather than the (obscure) keyboard shortcuts.
There are a few things that can be done using keyboard shortcuts but not the menu, e.g., switching from Ready mode to Edit mode. [Aside: will the Status Bar now show Select rather than Ready?] As for [F4], will it still cycle through relative/absolute variations in Edit and Enter modes when the cursor is at a range reference?
Harlan,
On the product team, we differentiate between accelerators, which are keyboard ways to access the Ribbon, menus and toolbars, and shortcuts which are essentially everything else. This list isn't meant to include accelerators, not because they aren't a big part of what keyboard users use (ALT+E+S+V+Enter and ALT+E+A+A come immediately to mind), but rather because shortcuts, unlike accelerators, are much more difficult to discover; the UI only lists a handful of them and good and reasonably complete documentation is often difficult to find.
"Select mode" is my own name for what Excel is in when it isn't in Edit, Enter, or Point modes. I always thought of it as "the mode you use to do cell selection." This list started out as my own personal spreadsheet of keyboard shortcuts that I aggregated from a bunch of sources (mostly the code - thanks in large part to Dan Cory who got a dump of parts of the code and cleaned it up a lot), so that's a hold-over of the way that I think of that mode. As a result you won't be seeing "Select" or "Select cells" on a status bar near you. That is, unless it catches on :)
F4 will absolutely still cycle through the verious modes of relative vs. absolute referencing. One of the things where this list isn't complete is in formula editing keyboard shortcuts. You'll also notice that F9 with text selected within a formula (which replaces the selection with the calculated result) doesn't show up here either. These were victims of a tradeoff I made for readability.
Thanks,
Charlie
Ctrl + 1 is one of my favorite shortcuts. It's not just Format Cell, as listed above; it's Foramt {Selected Item}. This makes it very versatile.
I wonder why you list the following as among your own favorites:
Shift + F12 – Save
Ctrl + F12 – Open
They've always seemed redundant to me. Aren't Ctrl + S and Ctrl + O even easier to remember? And just as quick to type? I've been using these since before there was Windows.
- Jon
Charlie-
>>F4 will absolutely still cycle through the verious modes of relative vs. absolute referencing.
What I'd love to see is for this to work when pointing to a named range. Say A1 is named "Rg". Now F4 has no effect (=Rg). Really useful would be =Rg, =A1, =$A$1,=A$1,=$A1, =Rg. I raised this way back in the XL97 beta when the pointing method was changed to pick up a range's name rather than address.
Jim
Just in case we all forget, thanks for compiling that list. I'm sure it'll help having all (most) shortcuts readily available at-hand to be studied and memorized.
Jensen Harris had mentioned that there were be a keyboard shortcut (Alt+Zero) that would allow you to quickly switch between the legacy keyboard accelerators and the new keyboard accelerators.
This way, you could live in "new mode" for most of the time, but using this hot key, you could quickly drop back to using a legacy accelerator if necessary.
This keystroke works in Excel Beta 1, but it is not in your table. Are there plans to keep this great shortcut in the final product?
As a Mac user who worked for almost 20 years on Windows Excel (who'd ever have thought we'd be able to say that, eh?) I really dislike the random remapping and absence of critical shortcut functionality in all recent Mac versions of Excel. I miss F2 for 'edit cell' and the Mac already has a perfectly good and traditionally-reinforced key binding for copy, paste or whatever the hell F2 does in Mac Excel. It's time to heave this baggage over the side and give Excel users the keystrokes our muscles know, where they don't conflict with the OS or its applications' dialects. Not all Mac user are mousebound Illustrator experts.
Bill, the keyboard model is evolving, but we share the goal of being able to efficiently use both old and new keyboard shortcuts. Alt+Zero or something better will be in the final product. Stay tuned.
Simon, I have passed your comments along to the Mac Excel folks.
David
Your list should meet the requirements of most users. Great job in putting it all together - thanks.
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