The *ONLY* 10 Excel keyboard shortcuts you need to master

hello and welcome to shandu.org many people ask me hey chandu excel has got hundreds of keyboard shortcuts just the other day i saw this keyboard shortcuts poster with 737 shortcuts which one should i remember well don't worry i am here to tell you the only 10 shortcuts that you need to memorize if you want to get really productive with excel once you are familiar with these 10 shortcuts you can go ahead and pick up some more shortcuts depending on what line of work you are in but as a start these are the 10 must know shortcuts for you let's get into them the very first shortcut is ctrl t t for table now most of the time when you are working with some sort of data in excel chances are you want to structure this data in a meaningful way this is where control t comes handy it takes your normal data and turns that into a tabular format so that you can instantly apply sorting filtering automatic formulas automatic charts and even powerful pivot tables so that's ctrl t for you the second shortcut that i have for you is control d d for data what control d does is let's say you got some text or some formula in a cell and you just want to fill that down into the next cell so you go to the empty cell underneath and you just press ctrl d and it will fill up the value from cell above so it's like the fill down shortcut i use it quite often especially when i'm building a dashboard or a big report with lots of calculations and i just want to copy the calculation down one cell but i'm a little too lazy to use my mouse and drag down or even copy paste i just use ctrl d d for data the third shortcut is ctrl shift l l for larry well l is actually for list what control shift l does is it on or off filters on your data many times when you are working in excel you are also doing some ad hoc analysis like you are just filtering all the records for a particular department or all the values that are greater than 75 or something like that and ctrl shift l is a great shortcut for getting the filters on and quickly go to the filter area to set up the filters without even going through the ribbon to enable or disable filters it's a dual shortcut so you press ctrl shift l once it will enable the filters and you press it again it will disable the filters the fourth shortcut is this is not actually a shortcut the fourth one it is actually an idea which is control and arrow keys now most of the people would be familiar with this but this is actually a kind of like a mandatory thing to know for normal or any way day to day excel users all you have to do when you have a large spreadsheet and you want to go from one point to another is just hold down your control key and press the arrow key in the direction you want to go and it will take you to the very last cell in that continuous range okay so that's ctrl arrow keys if you want to select the data you can hold down the shift key and then ctrl shift arrow keys will help you quickly select here is actually a sneaky little bonus shortcut this is not part of the top 10 but i want to actually add it in the context of control arrow keys thing which is let's say you got some data and you want to select everything normal process would be ctrl down arrow ctrl right arrow or ctrl shift down arrow ctrl shift right arrow to select the whole thing you could do the whole thing in one go by just selecting any cell inside the data it could be top cell it could be the cell in the middle and just press ctrl shift eight okay if you are wondering why eight if you look at your keyboard you would see that eight actually when you press with shift key is a star operator asterisk right so it's basically meaning control shift 8 or control asterisk which means all and you just select all and then it will select everything so ctrl shift 8 is a good shortcut for picking up all the values in a in a range that is together okay the fifth one is control one control one is a universal shortcut i really like this because it is actually one shortcut but it can do multiple things what does control one really do it formats things so if you select a range or a cell and press ctrl 1 it opens the format cells dialog if you select a particular chart or an element of the chart like the series or axis or the labels it will open up the format for those things if you select a drawing shape like a text box or an image it opens up the format properties for those things if you select your hard disk and press ctrl 1 it will format your hard disk and that's a joke but control 1 is for formatting anything it's a universal shortcut so it's an easy one to remember and you can use it in different situations depending on what you are doing the sixth one is control alt v this is for pasting special so normally control c control v we are familiar with that but if you want to do something more with your data when you are pasting like you just want to paste as values or you want to paste a link to the original data or you want to run an operation on top of the data then ctrl alt v is a great shortcut to remember this is a lot quicker than right clicking on your mouse and picking up the paste special dialog the next three shortcuts are function key shortcuts these are somewhat again versatile they change their behavior based on what you are doing the first one is f2 function key2 f2 is a good shortcut for editing the cell so you go to a cell and you just want to edit the cell that has a formula rather than double clicking on the cell to edit it you just select the cell and press f2 instantly excel will place the cursor at the very end and you can start typing your formula or editing it there so that's f2 the next one is f4 f4 actually does two things when you are writing a formula and if you are using f4 with any of the cell references in the formula it will change the style of reference in that formula so let's say you are writing a formula like a1 plus a2 and you press f4 near either a1 or a2 portion of the formula it will change a1 to dollar a dollar one so an absolute reference if you keep pressing f4 it will switch the reference styles so it will remove one of the dollars at a time until it goes back to a1 so that is you are f4 key when you are editing the formula but f4 is actually a dual purpose shortcut what f4 does outside when you are not normally editing any formulas but you are just doing an operation on the spreadsheet is it will repeat your last action okay so let us say you have selected a bunch of cells and made bold formatting on them and you select another set of cells you don't need to again go and click on bold you can just press f4 and it will repeat your last action on the latest selection this is very very useful especially if you are formatting things like you select a chart item and you change the color of it and you want to repeat that process on another chart you just select that other chart item press f4 it will repeat your last action just remember it will only repeat the last action it won't repeat the whole thing but it will repeat the last action i wish i could use f4 key in my real life when i am performing repetitive chores like you know washing dishes i would wash one dish press f4 and the other dishes would get done the third shortcut is well this is the third shortcut in the series of function keys is f9 key what f9 key does normally is it calc recalculates your formula so when you uh normally you don't need to use f9 key because most of the excel calculations are set to automatic that means anytime there is a change it will recalculate but if you want to just force the recalculation to happen you can use f9 key but f9 actually has a special purpose especially when you are building large or complex worksheets let's say you got a very very big formula and it is just giving an error and you don't know where that error is coming from you could use f9 key to debug the formula all you have to do is open the formula and then just select the portion of the formulas for example let's just say this is actually a nested formula and you want to select an individual portion of the formula to see if that part is coming up correctly or not just select that bit and press f9 and it will evaluate only that bit to show what that result is and you can that way actually narrow down where the problem is so those are the 9 shortcuts the 10th shortcut is easiest of them all and if you remember these 10 that's it you can produce a lot of work in excel without actually learning any more shortcuts the tenth one is alt key let's excel has actually hundreds of shortcuts so you don't need to remember all of them you just remember to press alt key and excel will actually show you all the shortcuts that are available there so when you press alt key in normal situation it will show you that h will take you to the home ribbon i will take you to the insert ribbon so on and so forth and you can use that behavior to learn the shortcuts as well as use keyboard to navigate everything in excel so that's your alt key alt key also works in other office software so it's a great shortcut to remember and use it across all the office products like outlook powerpoint word etc i do have one other shortcut to share with you this is using right mouse key on your keyboard certain keyboards do have a special key called right moves key this way you don't have to press right click button on your mouse you can just use the right mouse key on your keyboard and activate the context menus that normally appear when you right click on any particular item in excel or other applications that you use so i hope you found all of these 10 shortcuts very useful i wish you all the best with your excel usage and stay tuned for more videos bye

Channel: Chandoo

Views: 71,594

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Keywords: chandoo, chandoo.org, Excel, spreadsheets, What are most important Excel shortcuts, Best excel shortcuts, top 10 excel shortcuts, excel keyboard shortcuts list

Id: ykP-agYOtC4

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020