Keyboard Shortcuts: Navigation & Selection

Keyboard Shortcuts: Navigation and selection

keyboard shortcuts that facilitate quick and easy navigation within your cells, columns, and rows in your spreadsheet. So let's start off with very simple navigation. If I need to navigate one, sell it at the time, then the keyboard keys, I'll look too on my keyboard or the arrow keys.

Arrow Keys

If I press the down arrow key, I move down one cell. If I keep pressing it, I move down several cells. Now I'm in row nine.

I want to navigate one cell to the right. So I'll use the right arrow key. Then I'll continue pressing the right arrow key until I get to the word down. And then I'll press the down our key several times until I get to the word left. You can pretty much figure out what's going to happen here.

I'll use the left arrow key to get to the word up and then I'll go up. I guarantee you people do not take our courses to learn how to do this. They already know how to do this in Excel. We want to show you another way that you can navigate cells besides moving one cell at a time. This is going to involve a combination of two keyboard keys, the control key and the direction where you want to navigate too.

Control = Booster

So if I'm at the word start here and I quickly want to get to the word down, the control key is gonna be like a booster rocket. If I hold onto control and press the right arrow key, I jump to the word down. And then if I own and get from the word down to the word left control down arrow.

Now, I don't even have to take my hand or my finger off the control key. If I just press on the control key and use the arrow keys, I can press wants to get to the word up. If I press the left arrow key, then get to the text. Start here by pressing you up, then right down, left up. I can move up and down and I can move left and right.

Now, when you're able to do this, I usually tell students they've learned a very valuable skill because if there was ever a situation where someone was walking up behind them at their desk, they could do this to make themselves look busy. So this is a very useful skill. Don't tell anyone I said that. So that is quickly navigating around a group of cells. Now we want to take a look at how you can select cells. So I'm going to move down further down the spreadsheet.

I'm going to select the cell that says shift key because that's what we'll actually need to do. Press and hold the shift key. Then I'll use the arrow keys to extend my range for press the right arrow. I select not only the cell that contains shift key, but also the cell to the right that contains right arrow. If I keep pressing the right arrow, I'm continuing to extend my range.

Selecting Cells

Now I want to select all the cells underneath my current selection. So down arrow key again while holding on to shift allows me to select multiple rows. Now I'm going to go backwards. I could have also selected the column I'm currently in by pressing the down arrow key and then press the right arrow key to also select the table.

So this allows you to move one cell at a time in any direction or multiple rows or columns, depending on how much you've selected initially. So the shift key is like the pivot foot in basketball. It's the one foot that can't move, but it can extend anywhere around that initial pivot foot. All right.

So now let's move down and take a look at a much larger table. We want to be able to select all the headers in this table. So this is going to require a combination of control, plus shift plus arrow control will allow us to navigate quickly and shift will select. So control shift, right? Arrow allows me to select all the headers in the table. Control shift down. Arrow selects all the rows for that table.

Now, I could also I'm going to press the up arrow and then press the down arrow. I could also press control, shift down to select the first column and then control shift right to select the rest of the table. So those are keyboard shortcuts for navigating and selecting data within your spreadsheet.

I'm going to move down to about row 56. And it says actually right before row 56 in row 54, it says, are you lost? That's just reminding us that if we need to get back to the top of the spreadsheet, we can simply press control home. Home is considered the starting place in Excel, and that's cell A1 from here, all the Ehman, all the information emanates from this spot. If I want to get to the end of the spreadsheet, not necessarily the entire spreadsheet, but to the end of the data that's in the spreadsheet, I'll press control E and D end. That's the opposite corner.

Control and takes me to the last cell in the workbook where data has been entered. If I want to get back to the beginning control home now, I'm going to move back down and I'll use page down without pressing anything else. Page down. Moves me down an entire page. Then I'll start to move over to here.

Navigating Sheets

And let's say I want to navigate to another sheet. I don't want to navigate within cells or within a range. So the keyboard shortcut that's going to take me to the next page in the workbook. And if you think of a tab as being a page, then that's the analogy you'll keep in your mind. Is control page down. If I press control page down, I go to page two. Guess what I would need to press to get back to navigation control page up.

And so this allows me to navigate the sheets in my workbook and makes me a little bit more efficient because I'll have to depend less on the mouse. On the Mac, you may not have page up and page down keys. So we let you know that if you use option plus the right arrow and left arrow, you can use that to navigate the sheets in your Excel workbook. If you're on a Mac laptop.

So now I'll just press control home and that completes our section on navigation.

You're able to easily select cells and ranges as well as navigate them using these handy keyboard shortcuts.

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