Keyboard Shortcuts

Sorry- I skipped yesterday - not on purpose... just lost track of time. And guess what? - I don't have a lot of time today either. Unfortunately, nothing exciting - just trying to complete the training manuals I am using at the the Indiana CPA Society next month. One course is on Advanced Tools for Analysis and the other is Timesavers for Experienced Users.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the basics - keyboard shortcuts. If you are like me, you learned some of them in an intro Excel course ..oh so long ago and then promptly forgot them. Well, let me tell you the control key and the shift key are two that you don't want to forget.

CONTROL KEY
Selecting non-contiguous rows can be useful for formatting. For instance, if you find yourself formatting the top row and then the bottom row of your income statement as currency then this technique will be useful for you.

Selecting non-contiguous rows of data is easy. Simply select the first row of data as you normally would and then hold down the CTRL key on the keyboard and then select the next row of data. You can repeat this multiple times.

SHIFT KEY
If you’ve selected too much or too little, simply hold down the Shift Key and then use the arrows on the keyboard to add or reduce cells. The Shift Key locks you into place. This also works in Microsoft Word.

If you know the size of the data you want to select , you can click on the 1st cell that you want to select, hold down the Shift Key, and then click the last cell in the range and Excel will select everything in between automatically. In this example, if I click on Cell A1, hold down the Shift key and select C3, all the cells in between are selected.

By the way, these shortcuts also work in Microsoft Word.
Talk to you tomorrow.