Excel Training: Tips, tricks and shortcuts every employee should know

Heres some more amazing top tips, tricks and shortcuts for you

“So today we’re going to talk about excel, one of my favorite microsoft applications and I’m going to give you a few nice little tips to start the ball rolling, when it comes to highlighting data an essential part of Excel when you’re working with small data sets or large data sets. So, let’s just get stuck in straight away.  I’m just going to step out of this presentation here and I’m going to go into my file here.

So, the first thing we need to know well – what is the best way to navigate a data set like this. What you’re going to realize when it comes to excel is you now have a huge amount of rows and columns to work with. Excel in the latest versions, you now have you know, sixteen thousand plus columns, one million plus rows, you really need to kind of be able to navigate your data your cells really really quickly.

So, one of my top tips when it comes to navigating is control and your four arrow keys. So, here’s my data set here, not a particularly big one has about 800 rows of data but i want to jump around it really quickly. So, here’s how we’re going to do it. I‘m going to hold down the control key and click the cell A1, at the moment you can see that here and if I hold down control arrow right it brings me to the last column of data, control arrow down brings me to the last cell and if I definitely want to make sure that that’s the last row of data and not just a break in it, If I hit control down arrow a second time look at that, brings it down to the one million forty eight thousand five hundred seventy sixth row just like that. So, if I want to go back up again control arrow left, arrow up and arrow up again. So, a really quick way of navigating your data sets when it comes to excel is control and your four arrow keys.

So, now you’re thinking well not only do i need to navigate i need to highlight at the same time too. Brilliant, okay so what you’re going to do is take the tip I gave you and add this shift key to it. So, control shift and your four arrow keys. So, ctrl shift arrow right, arrow down in two simple clicks you can see it highlights the entire data set.

For me again just to kind of show you very quickly the most common mistake I see a lot of people make when it comes to these things is when they’re highlighting, they’re clicking on the column heading or the row heading. You’ve got to remember when you’re doing stuff like that in excel you’re highlighting the entire thing you’re holding all one millions plus cells of that column or all 16,258 rows or cells of that row.

Here you can see control shift if I just want to highlight a column I can or if I want to highlight the entire data set ctrl shift arrow right, arrow down and again just makes the whole process that bit easier.”

Microsoft Excel is an extremely critical tool in the world of business, education and home offices, but are you using it as efficiently as possible? Even if you are familiar with Microsoft Excel, the number and variety of keyboard shortcuts you can use to speed up your work may shock you.

If you find yourself constantly reaching for your computer mouse or your laptop’s trackpad, you are slowing yourself down and hobbling your typing speed, costing yourself time and energy in the long run. Learning how to correctly use keyboard shortcuts can save you a lot of this time and energy, while boosting your overall productivity. You can find out more about these shortcuts and much more about business, websites and Microsoft Office in our helpful Blog section.

If you found this tip on learning about Microsoft Excel helpful, InvestinU offers a range of training supports, including Webinar Excel Training, for Microsoft 365 which can be found here.

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