Excel shortcuts for beginners: the 12 that actually save time

The four jobs these twelve keys do

Everything you do in a spreadsheet is one of four things: you move somewhere, you select something, you change what is in a cell, or you move data from one place to another. Each of the twelve belongs to one of those jobs, which is why they are learnable as a set and not as a list.

• Moving, arrow keys, Ctrl+Arrow, Home, Tab.
• Selecting. Shift+Arrow.
• Editing a cell, F2, Enter, Escape.
• Clipboard and undo. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Shift+V, Ctrl+Z.

On a Mac, read Cmd wherever this page says Ctrl. The two genuine exceptions are listed at the end.

Moving: stop scrolling to the bottom of a column

The arrow keys move one cell. That part is obvious. The one that changes how a spreadsheet feels is Ctrl+Arrow, which jumps to the far edge of the data in that direction, the last filled row of a column, the last filled column of a row. On a sheet with four thousand rows, Ctrl+Down is the difference between arriving instantly and dragging a scrollbar.

Home returns to the first column of the row you are on, which is how you get back to the labels after wandering off to column R. Tab moves one cell right and is mostly used while typing: it commits what you have entered and steps across, so you can fill a row left to right without touching the mouse.

Selecting: Shift turns any movement into a selection

Shift+Arrow extends the selection instead of moving it. That is the whole rule, and it composes with everything above: Shift+Arrow takes one cell at a time, and holding Ctrl as well takes the whole block at once. Select a column of numbers this way and the sum appears without you writing a formula at all.

This matters more than it sounds, because almost every action in Excel applies to a selection. Formatting, deleting, copying, charting, sorting. Each one is 'select this, then do that'. Being quick at the select half makes you quick at all of them.

Editing: F2 is the one beginners are never told about

If you select a cell and start typing, you replace what was there. That is correct behaviour and it is what you want nine times in ten. The tenth time, the cell contains a long formula with one wrong character in it, and replacing the lot means retyping the whole thing.

F2 opens the cell for editing with the cursor inside it, at the end of what is already there. Now the arrow keys move the text cursor rather than the selection, and you can fix the one character. For anyone who has retyped a forty-character formula because of a misplaced bracket, this single key is worth the rest of the page.

Enter commits the entry and moves down one cell, which is why entering a column of numbers works without ever touching the mouse. Escape abandons the edit and puts the cell back exactly as it was, the safe exit when you have started changing something and realised you are in the wrong cell.

Clipboard: copying a formula is not copying a number

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V do what you expect. What surprises people is what happens to a formula on the way. Copying a formula shifts its references to match where it lands: a formula in D2 that reads B2 will read B3 when it is pasted into D3. That is deliberate, and it is the mechanism that lets one formula fill a whole column.

Only D2 was typed. The three cells under it are copies, and each one quietly became =B3*C3, =B4*C4 and =B5*C5 as it landed. Write a four-row calculation once rather than four times, and a four-hundred-row one in the same keystroke.

Ctrl+Shift+V pastes values only: the number a formula produced, with the formula thrown away. Use it when you want to freeze a result, sending a figure to someone whose copy of the file will not have the source data, or keeping last quarter's numbers after the source table has been overwritten. Use the ordinary Ctrl+V everywhere else, because a pasted value stops updating and a stale number is harder to spot than a broken formula.

Ctrl+Z undoes the last change, repeatedly. It is the reason you can afford to experiment in a spreadsheet, and the reason the correct response to 'I think I broke something' is to press it rather than to start repairing by hand.

Practise all twelve here

Ctrl+Shift+V is the one key in the twelve that needs something on the clipboard first, so it is not in the checklist above. The exercise linked at the foot of this page is built around it.

How to make them stick

Shortcuts are motor memory, not knowledge. Reading one a hundred times does nothing; using one twenty times under mild pressure makes it automatic and you stop being able to say what the keys are without miming them.

1. 1Pick three, F2, Ctrl+Arrow and Ctrl+Z are the usual first three.
2. 2Use them for a week on real work, deliberately, even when the mouse would be quicker that one time.
3. 3Notice the next thing you do repeatedly with the mouse, and look up only that.
4. 4Add three more. Stop when you stop noticing repetition.

The reason this works and a printed list does not is that the lookup happens at the moment you want the thing, which is also the moment it is memorable. Learning shortcuts in advance of needing them is learning the index of a book.

What goes wrong

These are the four mistakes that come up again and again. Each one is reasonable. That is why people make it.

Common questions