Did you know you can copy and paste simultaneously in Excel?
Just use Ctrl+D, Ctrl+R, Ctrl+Enter or Autofill.
These magic tricks don’t fit every situation. But when they do fit, they’re lightning fast.
Below is a magic show — and after that the magic tricks are discussed. [Read more…]
When you right click on a Chart (or in any other context), you typically get a “context menu” that looks something like the ones further down the screen. Context menus give you a sort of hidden shortcut option I call “hybrid” shortcuts. They work by simply typing the underlined hot key for a menu option — rather than clicking on it.
I call these shortcuts “hybrid” shortcuts because they’re part keyboard shortcut, part mouse shortcut. If they were animals, they might be half-man, half-beast. Kind of like the mutants below.
My favorite hybrid shortcuts involve virtually no extra motion from my hands. My left hand stays on the left side of the keyboard and my right hand stays on the mouse. Call me lazy.
Below are four different shortcuts to delete Excel worksheets. The second one is the fastest, and hence my favorite.
(1) Right-clicking: RC-<Delete> while hovering over the tab. You’ll see the following when right-clicking over the tab — just click on Delete:
(2) Hybrid shortcut: RC-D (Right-Click, followed by typing ‘D’). This does the same thing as RC-<Delete>, except you’re using the hot key instead of clicking. The ‘D’ is underlined in Delete, which means you can just type ‘D’ instead of clicking on Delete. I call this a “hybrid” shortcut since it combines mouse and keyboard into one shortcut. This is the fastest (typing ‘D’ is faster than clicking on ‘Delete’). [Read more…]
Double-clicking in Excel is like lighting dynamite — it tends to “explode” or expand things.
Here are my favorite double-click shortcuts — what about you?
AutoFit: Double click on the edge of a column (or row) to automatically resize it to the widest (or tallest) column (or row) (you can do a similar thing with the bottom of the formula bar) [Read more…]
Excel shortcuts come in eight basic flavors (there are more but these are the main ones):
Below, I’ll go through each type of shortcut briefly, with a few examples of each.
But first, here is an animation of Alt shortcuts to whet your appetite:
