Windows Keyboard Shortcut of the Day

Suppose you’ve used the mouse to scroll too far in Excel. You’re lost. The cells are zooming by at a million miles an hour. You just want to get back to see the cell where your cursor is. Help! Scrolling around to find the active cell will take forever!
Ctrl+Backspace moves the visible area of the spreadsheet back to whereever your cursor is (the so-called active cell).

To move to the right in Excel to see your next group of columns, you could scroll. Or you could press the Right Arrow key a bunch of times.

Or, press Alt+Page Up. You immediately find yourself one screen to the right looking at your next batch of columns.

Conversely, Alt+Page Down moves you to the left.

(Compare to the regular Page Up and Page Down, which you already know moves you up and down a screen.)

Don’t click on the Insert menu and then the Worksheet command. Don’t even press Alt+I, W. Just press Shift+F11 and a brand new worksheet is created for you in Excel.

When you’re using Excel 2003 or later, from time to time it’ll point out mistakes in your formulas or other observations by indicating a green triangle in the upper left of the cell, along with an exclamation point in a yellow diamond. The idea is you click on the diamond to see a menu with some options from Excel.

Clicking? Moi? Nope, instead of reaching for the mouse, just press Alt+Shift+F10, and the menu then opens. (Just have your cursor somewhere in the cell with the Smart Tag.) Once the menu appears, it’s just a regular menu, and you can use the Up Arrow or Down Arrow plus Enter to select an item, or press Esc to cancel.

Similarly, in Microsoft Word, sometimes you’ll be typing and Word will make a correction and show a blue double underline. Move your mouse to the underline and a yellow lightning bolt appears. Click on the lightning bolt and you’ll have some menu items to control the behavior of whatever automatic correction Word made.

Again, clicking? No need. The same Alt+Shift+F10 will open the Smart Tag menu in Word. Just have your cursor somewhere in the word with the double blue underline.

Move to a cell, hit Ctrl+; and today’s date will be typed into the current cell. Press Enter to accept the date. (Note that this isn’t a formula, so if you do it today, on Friday the Thirteenth, it’ll still say 7/13/2007 tomorrow.)

Everyone knows you can copy and paste cells in Excel, but a lot of times you want to do it quickly in a specific way. Turns out there are two simple keyboard shortcuts that let you copy cells quickly.

Move your cursor to a cell that you want to copy. Suppose you want to copy it down five times. Hit Shift+Down Arrow four times to select the four cells below your current one. Then press Ctrl+D. Whatever is in the first cell is copied to fill the remaining cells. (Whatever was in those cells is overwitten.)

You can do the same thing to the right with Shift+Right Arrow and Ctrl+R.

In Excel, type a number into a cell (such as “54.1″) and press Enter. Then press Ctrl+Shift+4 (or another way to think of that is Ctrl+$). Instantly the currency format is applied to the selected cells, and your “54.1″ becomes “$54.10″.

You have quite a few other options as well:

• Ctrl+~ (Ctrl+Shift+`): General format
• Ctrl+! (Ctrl+Shift+1): Number format (with two decimal places and the thousands separator)
• Ctrl+@ (Ctrl+Shift+2): Time format
• Ctrl+# (Ctrl+Shift+3): Date format
• Ctrl+$ (Ctrl+Shift+4): Currency format
• Ctrl+% (Ctrl+Shift+5): Percentage format
• Ctrl+^ (Ctrl+Shift+6): Exponential format

Similar to yesterday’s tip, you can press Ctrl+0 to hide the column where the cursor is located. Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Shift+0 unhides all the columns in the sheet.

We’ll hit some more Excel tips this week.

In Excel, move somewhere in a row you want to hide and press Ctrl+9. The entire current row is hidden (and you don’t need to select the entire row, just have your cursor somewhere in the row).

Remember you can use Shift+Up Arrow or Shift+Down Arrow to select while moving; this way, you can select cells on several rows. Once you have cells from more than one row selected, all of those rows are hidden when you press Ctrl+9.

Next, try this: Press Ctrl+A to select the worksheet, then press Ctrl+Shift+9 — also known as Ctrl+( — to unhide all of the rows that are hidden.

In most Microsoft Office apps (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook), tap F7 to begin the spellcheck process.

In the spellecheck dialog box, don’t forget to use Alt plus an underlined letter to hit the button! Using Alt+A to Add a correct word (such as your last name) to your custom dictionary is smart because it saves time in two ways — now, by saving you from having to use your mouse to hit the button, and later, by preventing this correctly spelled word from ever wasting your time again.

Similar to yesterday’s tip, Ctrl+Shift+P will jump your cursor in the font size (also known as “point size,” thus the letter P for the keyboard shortcut) box on the Formatting toolbar in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Once there, type in a number such as 18 and press Enter. Whatever text is selected will change to the new size; if no text is selected, whatever you type next will be at the new size.

Using Excel, Word, or PowerPoint? Have the Formatting toolbar visible? Good, don’t spend another second moving your mouse up to that font selection area. Instead, press Ctrl+Shift+F, and all of a sudden your cursor is in the Font selection button on the Formatting toolbar. From there you can type in the first few letters of a font name (such as ver to get “Verdana”) and press Enter, or you can press the Up Arrow and Down Arrow keys to select the fonts one at a time. Press Alt+Down Arrow to see the pulldown menu.

Does this work with Microsoft Outlook? Alas, no. That would imply a consistency of design that, sadly, does not exist.

In a few applications, you can press Ctrl+Y to repeat the last command. Very handy in Excel, for example.

In most applications, Ctrl+F lets you find text in the current document.

You may know that when you’re selecitng cells in Excel with the mouse, pressing the Ctrl button as you click adds the selected cells to the selection.

But, there’s an easier way. First, let’s try “Extend Mode” with F8. If you press F8, you enter Extend Mode, and now the arrow keys will extend the selection. (Of course, we already covered here that pressing Shift when you use the arrow keys does the same thing without messing around with the F8 key.)

However, this next bit’s useful. If you press Shift+F8, then you lock in the current group of selected cells, and can use the arrow keys to move to another area, and then select new cells (either using the normal Shift select method or Extend Mode).

Once the cells are selected, you can do whatever you like to them, such as bold with Ctrl+B.

Normally you press Ctrl+A to select all, but that’s not always so useful in Excel since it selects the entire (gigantic) worksheet, most of which is blank.

How many times have you started to try to select your column of numbers by using the mouse and then Excel starts scrolling off the screen like mad? Before you know it, you’re down at row 30,000 and then are trying to scroll back up (all while holding down the left mouse button) only to end up scrolling too far the other way. No fun. So — don’t try to play games of dexterity with Excel. If you want to select everything in the block where your cursor is, try Ctrl+*.

Forget the clumsy task of clicking in the formula bar when editing a cell in Microsoft Excel. Instead, press F2 and you’ll be editing the cell right in the spreadsheet where the cell is.

Once you’re editing a cell, you can use the standard navigation keys (Home, End, Ctrl+Left Arrow, Ctrl+Right Arrow) to get to where you want, then press Enter to accept your changes (or press Esc to cancel).

For example, suppose you need to change the number “151,000″ into “15,100.” Don’t retype it! Just press F2, then press Backspace to get rid of the extra zero, then press Enter. Done!

Excel has a strange navigation key that’s fairly unique and takes a bit of getting used to, but once you start using it, you’ll wonder how you ever used Excel without it.

Load up an Excel spreadsheet for practice, and then position your cursor somewhere in the middle of some cell entries. (Remember you can use the F5 key to go to a location.)

Now press End then the Right Arrow key (one after the other). You’ll go to the rightmost entry in the column of cell entries. Hit End, Down Arrow. You’ll move down until you hit the next empty cell.

If you start in an empty cell, Excel will keep moving in the direction of the arrow key you press until it hits a non-blank cell.

This week we’ll cover Microsoft Excel tips.

One of the most useful Excel shortcuts is Ctrl+1 (that’s the number one), which brings up the format cell dialog box. Once there, recall you can press Ctrl+Tab to cycle between tabs on the dialog box (Number, Alignment, Font, etc.).

To use the keyboard with the dialog box, you may want to review keyboard navigation of dialog boxes.

If a program or dialog box has tabs (different divided sections or pages with a label at the top), chances are that Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down will change tabs.

Try this out with Firefox and Excel to start off.

In Firefox, remember from yesterday that you can create a new tab with Ctrl+T. Now use Ctrl+Page Up to rotate through the pages (or Ctrl+Page Down to rotate the other way).

In Excel, you’ll start out with three sheets (Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3) when you start a new document. Ctrl+Page Down will move from Sheet1 to Sheet2 and Sheet2 to Sheet3. Ctrl+Page Up will move from Sheet3 to Sheet2 or Sheet2 to Sheet1.

For dialog boxes, if Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down don’t change tabs for you, try Ctrl+Left Arrow and Ctrl+Right Arrow, or Ctrl+Up Arrow and Ctrl+Down Arrow. Unfortunately, applications aren’t always as consistent as we’d like.

For most applications that support working with more than one document at once, Ctrl+N starts a new document, without having to answer questions about what kind of new document you want. Try it in Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.

Be careful when using Microsoft Outlook, because Ctrl+N has a different meaning depending on what section of Outlook you’re in. For example, in Calendar mode, Ctrl+N creates a new appointment, while in Mail mode, Ctrl+N creates a new e-mail message.

To round out our navigation week, let’s use an application-specific keyboard shortcut.

If you use Microsoft Word, try this (when editing a long document): Press F5, and the “Go To” dialog box appears. (It may look a bit different depending on which version of Microsoft Word you’re using.) Type in a page number, like 15, and press Enter. Your cursor should now be at the top of page 15. You can then press Esc to cancel the dialog box.

If you use Microsoft Excel, try pressing F5 and in the Go To dialog box, type in a cell (such as B500), then press Enter.

There are more advanced ways of using the Go To dialog box in both applications, but we’ll save that for a future day.