Excel on Speed

[slowfox]

Discard your mouse.

To select adjacent cells: use SHIFT + the cursor keys

To select rows corresponding to the current highlighted cell(s): SHIFT + SPACE
To select columns corresponding to the current highlighted cell(s): CTRL + SPACE

Lemme 'splain.

If we have cell A1 as the cursor's current focus, pressing SHIFT + SPACE will select the whole of Row 1.
Pressing CTRL + SPACE will select all of Column A.

If we have cells A1 and A2 selected, then pressing SHIFT + SPACE will select rows 1 and 2.
Similarly, if B2 and C2 are selected, then pressing CTRL + SPACE will select columns B and C.

It should be but a short leap of logic to deduce, from this, that pressing CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE will select the whole worksheet (because you're either selecting all the corresponding columns for each cell in a highlighted row, or all the corresponding rows for each cell in a highlighted column).

More tricksy speed selection later, but for the time being, now that you've got your cells selected, what can you do?

Standard Windows Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo/Repeat keys apply, as you'd expect:

• COPY selected cells: CTRL-C


• CUT selected cells: CTRL-X


• PASTE selected cells: CTRL-V


• UNDO most recent action: CTRL-Z


• REDO most recent action: CTRL-Y

You'll also be unsurprised to learn that CTRL-B switches bold on and off, CTRL-I switches italics and CTRL-U switches underlining.

For more complex format trickery, use SHIFT-F10 to bring up the shortcut menu (equivalent to a right click on our discarded mouse), and speedily navigate therein with the cursor keys and Enter.

To search for things within the selected cells, use either CTRL-F or SHIFT-F5.

To replace text across the selected cells, use CTRL-H.

To get to the 'File Open...' dialogue box, I prefer CTRL-F12. The 'Save As...' shortcut is just vanilla F12. The print dialogue is accessible from CTRL-SHIFT-F12. The 'Esc' key will cancel each and any of these dialogues, should you need to.

Now for the really cool stuff.

CTRL + cursor key will either jump your cursor to the end of adjacent data in the direction of the cursor arrow, if you're in a filled cell, or jump you to the first instance of data in the direction of the arrow, if you're in an empty cell.

Huh?

	A	B	C	D
1	Account	X	Y	Z
2	FG38929	9443	5530	5946
3	DF95820	1735	7042	5432
4	MJ11616	3219	2213	9791
5	BF34235	9107	8213	7844

Right: with cell A1 selected, pressing CTRL + cursor right will jump you to cell D1;
with cell D1 selected, pressing CTRL + cursor down will jump you to cell D5;
with cell D5 selected, pressing CTRL + cursor left will take you to cell A5;
with cell A5 selected, pressing CTRL + cursor up will take you to cell A1.

In each case, the cursor is being jumped to the end of the data in the 'block' that you're in: I know I started the example at the top left corner of the spreadsheet. If you had a block of data in the middle of the 'sheet, then the jumping would be restricted to that block of data.

Pressing CTRL + cursor at the edge of data into blank space will take you to the next data section, or the beginning/end of the row/column you're in.

In the above example, from A1, CTRL-Right takes you to D1. Pressing CTRL-Right again will take you to the end of row 1.

Aside from being useful for quick navigation around the spreadsheet, this is AWESOME for selecting cells, by adding the SHIFT key to the combination.

Starting at A1, CTRL-SHIFT-Right will select cells A1 - D1 inclusive.
The pressing CTRL-SHIFT-Down will extend the selection vertically to row 5.

So now we've got our entire dataset selected with two keystrokes.

It gets better :-)

Let's say we want to sum X + Y + Z for each row.

The forumla is entered in E2 (row 1 is header). With E2 selected:

• press CTRL-C to copy the formula.


• press cursor left once to take us to D2, the final cell of our current data block;


• press CTRL-Down to jump to the bottom of our data block (D5);


• press cursor right once to take us to E5, the empty cell at the foot of the column into which we want to paste our forumula;


• press CTRL-SHIFT-Up to jump to our originally entered formula, selecting all the cells from where we were to our target. In the above example, this selects E5 to E2 inclusive;


• Press CTRL-V to paste the formula across all selected cells!

It looks convoluted, I know, but once you get a feel for how to jump around spreadsheets using CTRL+cursor, and selecting ranges using CTRL-SHIFT-Cursor, this is very, very fast. And saves hours of auto-fill, painfully dragging the mouse down columns or whatever.