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10 Useful Excel Shortcuts

By October 14, 2014 August 5th, 2020 No Comments

The Journal of Accountancy published 10 useful Excel shortcuts. As a CPA, I spend a lot of time in excel, and I find shortcuts extremely helpful and they allow me to work more efficiently. These are the 10 listed:

  1. The SUM function. Pressing Alt+= in the cell below a column of numbers inserts the SUM function and highlights that column of numbers.
  2. Select a range of data. Pressing Ctrl+A inside a range of data selects the data range.
  3. Select an entire worksheet. Pressing Ctrl+A outside a range of data selects the entire worksheet.
  4. Select a column. Pressing Ctrl+Spacebar selects the entire column where your cursor is located.
  5. Select a row. Pressing Shift+Spacebar selects the entire row where your cursor is located.
  6. Go to cell A1. Pressing Ctrl+Home moves the cursor to cell A1 (unless you have your Transition navigation keys turned on, in which case pressing the Home key accomplishes this task).
  7. Go to the end. Pressing Ctrl+End moves your cursor to the bottom-right corner of the active range. (The active range can be defined as that range from cell A1 to the intersection of the bottommost row and rightmost column in which you have entered data, even if you have since deleted that data.)
  8. Hide a column. Pressing Ctrl+0 (zero) hides the current column, or columns if you have more than one column selected. This shortcut even works when you use the Ctrl key to select multiple columns that are not adjacent to one another.
  9. Insert the date. Pressing Ctrl+Semicolon inserts the current date.
  10. Insert the time. Pressing Ctrl+Shift+Semicolon inserts the current time.

Of the shortcuts listed in this article, I use many of them; but, the one that saves me the most time is the insert date function. There are lots of internal documents that we use that have specific cells used to document a date of when an item is complete.

We invite you to comment below with your experience with Excel shortcuts… either good or bad.

Attached is a link the article,10 Excel Shortcuts by J. Carlton Collins

Author: Edward J. Elsner CPA, CFE