I had a request to run through some of my most useful keyboard shortcuts. So that's exactly what we're going to do today. I'm going to show you some of my favourites. That you can add to your toolbox to increase your productivity and your efficiency. So let's dive straight in.
Now I'm just going to work with a small data set here, it doesn't really matter for what we're actually doing. And let's just click randomly in, let's say cell B9, for example. Now in my mind, I tend to divide keyboard shortcuts up into different categories. For example, we have navigation shortcuts, we have selection shortcuts, we have shortcuts that execute different things.
So, let's start out with some navigation and selection shortcuts so we can move around our worksheet a little bit quicker. Now, first things first, if you want to jump up to the first row of the column that you're currently in, you can press Ctrl Up Arrow. If you want to jump down to the last row, Ctrl Down Arrow.
And as you can imagine, Ctrl Right Arrow takes you to the last cell in the row, and Ctrl Left Arrow takes you to the first cell. Let's do Ctrl Up Arrow again to move to the top. Now, what about if I want to select the entire column of data? Well, if we press Ctrl Shift Down arrow, that's going to do exactly that.
And notice it only selects the data that we have in that column. If I decide at this point I want to select some more columns, I can simply hold down Shift and press the Right Arrow and it's going to select each column one by one. Now what about if I want to select the entire column including the blank cell?
So I want to select basically the entire column. Not just the data set. Well, this is where we can use Ctrl Space. That's going to select the entire column in your data set. If I want to do the same for the row, again, I can click anywhere and press Shift Space, and it's going to select the entire row. If I just want to select the data, Ctrl Shift, Right Arrow.
And again, you can select more rows by holding down Shift and using your Down Arrow. Another thing that I find myself doing all the time is inserting columns and rows. So if we select column D, we can press Ctrl Shift Plus to insert a brand new column. We can just keep on pressing Plus for the number of columns that we want to insert.
And if we want to do the reverse and delete columns, we just need to do Ctrl Minus. like so. And as you would imagine, this works the same for rows. So select one row, Ctrl Shift Plus. And you can enter in as many as you like. If you want to enter multiple rows at the same time, you can select the number of rows that you want to enter first, and then press Ctrl Shift Plus, and it's going to insert a big old block.
And remember, Ctrl Minus. We'll allow you to delete those out. Now, if I want to select all of my data, I think most people know this keyboard shortcut, Ctrl A, when you're clicked in your data. If you've got your mouse clicked over here and you press Ctrl A, it's going to select every cell on the worksheet.
So just be aware of that when you're using this keyboard shortcut. We can also use shortcuts to move quickly between different worksheets. So notice I have quite a few worksheets at the bottom. I'm currently clicked on Sheet 1. But if I hold down Control and press Page Down, it moves me to Sheet 2. Press it again, I go to Sheet 3, so on and so forth.
And I can press Control Page Up to go back the opposite way. So a really nice quick way of navigating between worksheets in your workbook. What else can we do here? Well, we can also execute commands from the ribbon using keyboard shortcuts. Now, I think most of us know some of the more familiar ones. For example, if we highlight all of the headings in this particular dataset, Control Shift Right Arrow, I can press Control B to apply bold formatting.
I could press Control I to make it italic. Control I again to turn that off. Control U will underline the text. Control U again to toggle it off. Now, with these keyboard shortcuts, for example, if I hover my mouse over bold on the ribbon, can you see it has the keyboard shortcut in there in brackets after the command name?
And you'll find this with some of the commands on the ribbon, you can actually see the shortcut in the screen tip. So again, just be aware of that. Another thing you might not be aware of is if you press the Alt key on your keyboard, check out what's happened to my ribbons! I now get a quick way of using my keyboard to navigate to different ribbons and execute different commands.
If I want to get rid of these key tips, I can press Escape on my keyboard. Now, let's use these key tips to execute something on this data. So what I'm going to do is, let's mess this data up a little bit. I'm going to make these columns like this. So, this is a fairly common task in Excel, is we want to widen out all of the columns in our dataset.
So the first thing we can do here is Ctrl A, keyboard shortcut, to select all. We could then press the Alt key. I'm going to go to the Home ribbon by pressing H. And now I get a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts. I'm going to press O to open up the Format menu. And then I'm going to choose AutoFit Column Width, so I want I in there.
And just like that, it has modified all of those column widths. So don't forget about these Alt key key tips. Now let's add another column here so we can work out what the total is. And my total is basically going to be a calculation of quantity multiplied by price. So we're going to type in equals sum.
Now instead of using the mouse to click on the cells you want to include in your calculation, we can use our arrow keys. So we're currently in cell F2. So let's use the left arrow to move across. We're going to say multiplied. And the thing you have to remember is that you're still in the cell that you're typing in.
So we need to go left again to select the next cell. Close the bracket. Now this is a formula that I'm going to want to copy down. So instead of pressing just the enter key which is going to move my cursor down into the next cell. I'm going to press Ctrl Enter, which keeps me in the same cell, making it slightly quicker for me to just double-click and copy that formula down.
Now let's add Total at the top here. Again, Ctrl Enter to stay in the same cell. Now, what about if I want to copy the formatting from this cell over to this cell? Well, I'm going to use my arrow key. Once again, I'm going to press Alt. We're going to go to the Home tab, and I can see that Format Painter is F.
So I'm now in Format Painter mode, and I can simply press the right arrow to apply that formatting to that cell. Final couple of things I'm going to do here. Let's select the price and total columns. So I'm going to do Ctrl Space Bar and then Shift Right Arrow to make my selection. Now I want to very quickly apply currency format to these two columns.
So I could go through my Alt keyboard shortcuts, that is absolutely fine, or I could press Ctrl Shift 4, and that's automatically going to apply that. If I wanted to apply, let's say, some additional formatting, Ctrl 1 is going to bring up the Format Cells dialogue box. And I can then go in, maybe change the alignment, maybe add a background fill.
Things like that. So control one will always bring up Format cells. The final thing I might want to do here is put this data into a table. Everybody's favourite shortcut control T. Yes, my table has headers. Let's click on okay. So these are the shortcuts that I recommend you add to your arsenal to make yourself more efficient when working in Excel.
