Summary of 50 Excel shortcuts you should know by 2023

Shortcuts in Excel help you manipulate your data quickly. In this article, we will discuss various Excel keyboard shortcuts. These keyboard shortcuts are used to perform tasks faster and more efficiently.

What is Microsoft Excel?

Although many of you already know about Excel, let's have a little introduction anyway. Microsoft Excel is an application developed by Microsoft that is used to record, analyze, and visualize data. Excel, a spreadsheet application, was developed by Microsoft in 1985.

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Data in Excel comes in rows and columns. Excel is commonly used to record and analyze data, perform mathematical operations, and visualize structured data in the form of charts and graphs. Finally, another important application of Excel is that it helps automate tasks through excel macros. 

To perform the above mentioned tasks quickly, Excel has a set of keyboard shortcuts. Many different operations can be performed with just a few simple keyboard taps. Let's dive into Excel shortcuts that can help us work better on Excel spreadsheets.

Needed for Excel shortcuts

Excel supports many keyboard shortcuts to help you work efficiently and increase productivity. Instead of accessing the toolbar with the mouse, two or three keystrokes are used to perform important functions. Wouldn't that be easier and save time? Using keyboard shortcuts in Excel significantly increases speed and therefore reduces working time. 

Now the question is, if you have to memorize these keyboard shortcuts, the answer is no. However, it will be an advantage if you can remember a few of them. With regular practice, you will be able to remember most of the common keyboard shortcuts in Excel.

Now let's take a look at the cheat sheet of Excel keyboard shortcuts, which you should know when working on Microsoft Excel. In this article, we have classified 50 Excel shortcuts based on their operation. First, we'll look at workbook keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts in workbooks

In this section, we will understand the basics of how to operate a workbook. We'll learn how to create a new workbook, open an existing workbook, and save the spreadsheet so you don't lose any data or calculations you've made. Then we'll look at how you can switch between several different worksheets in a workbook. 

Those are Excel shortcuts that can help you navigate through your spreadsheet. Once you've created your workbook, the next important step is to format the cells.

Cell formatting shortcut

A cell in Excel contains all the data you're working with. Several different keyboard shortcuts can be applied to a cell, such as edit cell, align cell content, add border to cell, add border to all selected cells, etc. Here are some a quick look at these Excel keyboard shortcuts.

In addition to the cell formatting shortcuts mentioned above, let's look at some more advanced and additional cell formatting Excel shortcuts, which may come in handy. 

We'll learn how to add comments to a cell. Comments are useful for providing additional information about cell contents. We will also learn how to find a value and replace it with another value in a spreadsheet. Then we'll look at how to insert the current time, current date, enable filters, and add hyperlinks to a cell. Finally, we'll see how to apply a format to the data in a cell.

Alt + Down Arrow30. To insert the current dateCtrl +;31. To insert the current timeCtrl + Shift +:32. To insert a hyperlinkCtrl + k33. To apply currency formattingCtrl + Shift + $34. To apply percentage formatCtrl + Shift +%35. Go to the 'Tell me what you want to do' box Alt + Q

After working with Excel cell formatting shortcuts, the next step is to understand how to work with entire rows/columns in Excel. 

Row and column formatting shortcuts

In this section, we'll look at some important row and column formatting shortcuts.

We will understand how to delete rows and columns, hide and show selected rows and columns, group and ungroup rows and columns.

Now that we have looked at the various keyboard shortcuts for formatting cells, rows, and columns, it's time to learn an advanced topic in Excel, i.e., dealing with pivot tables. Let's look at different keyboard shortcuts for summarizing your data using pivot tables.

Lesley Montoya

Update 01 October 2023