Use Control to move quickly round your Excel spreadsheet

When it comes to Excel, every little helps in saving time. A really easy and very effective way to save time and be more efficient is by using keyboard shortcuts and in this article we’re looking at the following:

– Control (Ctrl) + Keypad direction (Direction)

– Ctrl + spacebar

– Ctrl + Shift + Direction

Control (Ctrl) + Keypad direction (Direction)

This shortcut allows you to move from your current Active cell to the next non-contiguous cell. This means that if your current active cell contains a character, then using this shortcut will move you in the direction that you’ve selected to the last cell that has a character in it, before there is a blank. If your current active cell is blank, then the shortcut will move you to the first cell with a character in it in the direction that you’ve chosen.

Depending on the size of your dataset, this could be much faster than using the scroll bar at the side or bottom of the workbook.

Ctrl + Spacebar

This shortcut will highligh the entire column that you’re currently in (Shift + Spacebar will highlight the whole row. You can also do the same thing hby clicking on the row or column header with the mouse and either way is pretty quick. Bear in mind that these shortcuts will highlight the whole row or column in a workbook, not just those that are blank or have characters in them. If you just want to be able to highlight a range that has characters in a column or row then you need…

Ctrl + Shift + Direction

This shortcut is the real timesaver. This one allows you to highlight cells between the current active cell and the next non – contiguous cell. This one is particularly useful because without this shortcut, the only way to highlight a range of specific cells is to drag the mouse cursor down or across the page until all the cells you want are highlighted. I remember once in my first year as an auditor, it was busy season and I didn’t know this shortcut (I didn’t really know Excel!). I just wanted to copy and paste a range of data, but the range was almost the full length of the workbook. I was there for ages, just copying the data!!