Basic Excel tips and tricks - Become an Excel Pro user (Part 1)

1. Familiarize yourself with keyboard shortcuts

Alright, perhaps this first one doesn’t count as just one hack. However, if you’re looking for a surefire way to save yourself some time and frustration in Excel, it pays to familiarize yourself with some different keyboard shortcuts.

There are hundreds (yes, literally hundreds) that you can use. So, the best thing to do is to take note of some of the common tasks or actions you’re taking in Excel, and then seeing if there are existing keyboard shortcuts for those.

Here are a few of our favorites:

Autosum all selected cells

Speed up your number crunching by quickly summing numbers in a contiguous range.

PC: Alt =

Mac: Command Shift T

Select direct precedents

Select a cell with an active formula and see which cells are directly referenced by that formula.

PC: Ctrl [

Mac: Control {

Add a cell border

Save yourself some clicks when formatting by instantly adding a cell border. This works with one or multiple cells selected.

PC: Ctrl Shift &

 

Mac: Command Option 0

2. Select all cells with one click

Have hundreds (or even thousands) of rows of data—and need to select them all?

You can give yourself a finger cramp from tons of endless clicking and scrolling. Or, you can use this simple trick to select all cells with one single click.

All it takes is clicking on that light gray triangle that appears in the top left corner of your spreadsheet. Click it once, and every single cell in the spreadsheet will be selected. It’s as easy as that!

3. Instantly resize columns and rows

There’s nothing worse than having your text run outside of the width of the column. And, needing to click and drag to resize the column to the perfect width over and over again can be a pain.

Fortunately, you can do this instantly. Place your mouse on the line between two column markers (C and D, for example) until you see a symbol that looks like two opposite-facing arrows.

With that symbol, double click on that line that separates the columns, and the column will automatically be resized to fit the widest piece of text within that column.

Note: The same hack can be used to adjust the height of rows!

4. Easily format numbers

Let’s say that you have an entire column that contains digits that represent the same thing—like dollar amounts, for example.

Right now, there isn’t a dollar sign displayed in front of each number, and you’d like to insert one there. There’s no need to do this one at a time.

Simply select the column that contains the digits you want to re-format, and then use the below keyboard shortcut to automatically format that entire column to dollars:

Ctrl - Shift - $

With that simple trick, your entire column will be displayed with the dollar sign, any necessary commas, and two points after the decimal point.

Note: The same trick works for percentages! Just hit Ctrl - Shift - % to include the percent sign with each digit.

5. Move up without scrolling

When you have a particularly large data set, you know that it takes a while (and quite a bit of scrolling) to get all the way to the bottom of your worksheet. And, when you’ve finally made it? The last thing you want to do is scroll all the way back up to the top.

Pushing Command (Ctrl on a PC) and the up arrow twice will bring you back to the top of your spreadsheet.

Why do you have to hit the up arrow twice? Hitting it once will bring you to the last row of data that appears before an empty row (which, in this case, is the last line of our data). Hitting the up arrow twice brings us all the way back to the top.

So, to summarize:

Command (or Ctrl on a PC) + Up Arrow Once: Brings you to the last line of data that appears before a blank row

Command (or Ctrl on a PC) + Up Arrow Twice: Brings you to the top of your worksheet

Note that this shortcut works on Excel for Mac and PC 2016. Shortcuts on Mac may vary depending on your OS, or on older versions of Excel.

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