mjt91

Best Excel Shortcuts I personally use all day

[ excel finance productivity ] · 3 min read

I am a big believer that using the keyboard is always faster than using the mouse when it comes to get work done in Excel. Funnily enough there are a ton of memes about it. This is only one of them:

Shoutout to memes.xlsx definitely worth a follow.

Motivation

Recently we had some intern trying and he was (not) lucky to had the opportunity to checkout what my day-to-day work in Finance looks like. I was showing him some presentations, some documents I prepared and some tools I use and build. When I shared some excel file with him and moved around, created a table here and there, quick calculation he was surely impressed.

He even complimented me, saying that he had done some internships in Consulting and big Accounting firms but never seen someone beeing this proficient in navigation excel only using the keyboard.

Even if this sounds very nerdy now, this was joy to hear! The intern was quite tech-savy, this could have do something with it though!

Anyways, we discussed, that many people in finance are from the business side and prefer to use the mouse. When I interview colleagues, I often hear, that they use shortscuts for copy paste, but often not more. They name that it is hard to remember them (and looking them up online first is not efficient, then just using the mouse is faster).

Today I drove around with my bike and was thinking why not collect all the shortcuts I find particularly important to know in Finance from my point of view. I chose to group them by these categories

  • General
  • Navigation
  • Formatting

General

Shortcut Result
ALT + F9 Open VBA tools
CTRL + N Open new workbook
CTRL + P Open print pre-view
CTRL + ; Insert current date
CTRL + T Create table
CTRL + K Insert hyperlink
CTRL + D Flash fill from above
CTRL + + Insert new column/row if entire column/row is selected

Note: Excel allows to use CTRL + L to create a table, but I prefer to use the one above, since T = table in my monkey mind 😄

Shortcut Result
CTRL + SPACE Select entire column
SHIFT + SPACE Select entire row
SHIFT + ↓ Expand cell selection (any arrow key works)
SHIFT + CTRL + ↓ Select all the cells the bottom/left/right/up (any arrow key works)
CTRL + ↓ Jump to the last/first cell in the currently selected column/row (any arrow key works)

Formatting

Shortcut Result
CTRL + 1 Open formatting tool window
CTRL + SHIFT + # Apply date format
CTRL + SHIFT + & Add borders to selection

Cheatsheet

I decided to build a nice cheatsheet (highly influenced by Michael Goerz).

Find the cheat sheet available here: Excel Shortcuts for the highly efficient (EN) A german version (using German keyboard shortcuts) is available as well: Excel Shortcuts (DE)