Five Great Excel Selection Tricks
If you want to move more quickly and confidently in Microsoft Excel, here’s a couple of useful tips:
Start by having all your data touching, or contiguous. Extra rows, columns, and other spaces breaking up your data make this trick tougher. Then click any of the cells in the data set.
Have you drag-selected a big hunk of data? We all have. The keyboard shortcut that will save you a lot of grief is <CTRL> + <A>. This selects all the data that’s touching (this works in Excel 2003 and 2007). Make sure your selection is inside the data before you try it.
If you needed to select just the row you were in, the keyboard shortcut is <SHIFT> + <SPACE>. To select the column, it’s <CTRL> + <SPACE>. This selects the entire row or the entire column, the same as when you click the column header.
Finally, the one I like the best: selection of a column or row from within a data set. The difference with this tool is that you’re selecting only a single column or row, not the entire set of information, and you’re only selecting the cells with information in them.
First, click the label of a column, or the first cell of a row. Then, hold down <CTRL>+<SHIFT>. Then, press the arrow key in the direction of your data. To select the entire column, <CTRL>+<SHIFT>+<DOWN ARROW>. To select an entire row, <CTRL>+<SHIFT>+<RIGHT ARROW>.
If you want to know every keyboard shortcut in Excel, visit Microsoft.com.
For more training in Microsoft Excel, look into our Microsoft Excel 2003 Course or Microsoft Excel 2007 Course. For more efficiency using Microsoft Office, including some killer keyboard shortcuts, check out our course in Microsoft Office Efficiency.
