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Copy Only Visible Cells With Excel’s Alt+; Shortcut

March 25, 2016 by terp Leave a Comment

How Do I Use The Alt+;  Excel Shortcut To Select And Copy/Paste Only Visible Cells?

Say you have 1000 rows of data, with 15 hidden rows.  You’ve hidden those 15 rows because you don’t want to copy them.  You select the 1000 rows with Ctrl+A, then you do Ctrl+C to copy, and then Ctrl+V to paste.  Your selection (before you paste) looks like this:

excel-alt+;-select-shortcut

You’re moving fast and you think you’re a shortcut genius.  But to your chagrin, they hidden cells get copied anyway.

Why?  Because you selected them (even if you didn’t know it).

So how do you solve this problem without slowing down?

Simple: Alt+;

Here are the steps:

  1. Select the data, including the hidden cells/rows/columns
  2. Hit Alt+;  (doing this de-selects the hidden cells/rows/columns — see picture below)
  3. Hit Ctrl+C to copy
  4. Move to where you want to paste
  5. Hit Ctrl+V to paste

…and you’re done.

So the key step here is #2.  It contains this valuable shortcut:

De-Select Hidden Cells/Rows/Columns: Alt+;

You use this shortcut AFTER you have selected the data — but BEFORE you copy (or cut, or format, or whatever else you want to do).

After you hit Alt+; you’ll see that the selection looks different — only the visible cells are selected:

excel-alt+;-select-shortcut-visible-cells-only

Once you add Alt+; to your sequence you can walk around with the swagger of an Excel shortcut guru.

Impress your co-workers, your boss, your friends, your loved ones…

This baby can really save you some time.  Enjoy!

Filed Under: Alt Shortcuts, Copy & Paste, Excel Shortcuts, Keyboard Shortcuts Tagged With: Alt Shortcuts, cut copy paste, Excel Keyboard Shortcuts, Excel Shortcuts

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