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About this lesson
Utilize the keyboard or mouse to select cells and ranges in a spreadsheet.
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Exercise files
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Navigation.xlsx9.3 KB
Quick reference
Topic
Navigating the Excel Interface.
When to use
Selecting cells and ranges in the Excel interface.
Instructions
Selecting cells with the mouse
- To select a single cell, just click on it
- To select multiple contiguous cells, left click the first cell, and drag to the last one you want to include in the range
- To select non-contiguous cells, left click the first cell, hold down the CTRL key and click each other cell you’d like to select
Selecting cells with the keyboard
- To select a single cell, use the arrow keys to navigate to it
- To select multiple contiguous cells, select the first cell, hold down the SHFT key and arrow to the last one you want to include in the range
- Unfortunately, selecting non-contiguous cells cannot be done without the use of the mouse
Tab and Enter Functionality
- Pressing Enter will move you one cell down
- Pressing Tab will move you one cell to the right
- Pressing Enter AFTER PRESSING TAB will move you to the cell immediately below the cell you started tabbing from
Inserting/Deleting Columns/Rows
- Right click the Column header (column letter) or Row number and choose Delete to remove a column or row
- Right click the Column header (column letter) or Row number and choose Insert to insert a column or row
Undo
- In the QAT, the arrow that points to the left is the Undo arrow
- Clicking Undo will revert the last change in the “undo stack”
- Undo can also be triggered by pressing CTRL+Z
- 00:05 This video is gonna focus on how to move around inside the Excel grid.
- 00:10 Now you might think, really a whole video for that?
- 00:13 But you'd be surprised that there's actually a number of different ways.
- 00:17 So if we wanna select a specific cell, well it's relatively straightforward,
- 00:21 we just left-click it with a mouse and we could select this cell, or this cell,
- 00:25 this cell, whichever.
- 00:26 If we wanna select something that's off screen,
- 00:28 we just scroll down a little bit, select that cell and we're good to go.
- 00:34 Or if we wanna go back up, we'll scroll up with the scroll bar and away we go.
- 00:39 Now we can also select multiple cells, we can left-click and
- 00:43 drag and that will get us a selection here.
- 00:46 But one of the things you'll notice is when you left-click and
- 00:49 drag you always get a rectangular block.
- 00:51 What if I wanted to select two what we call noncontiguous or
- 00:55 separate blocks of cells?
- 00:57 Well the way that I do that is I hold down my Ctrl key and then I can left-click and
- 01:02 drag somewhere else.
- 01:03 So this will allow me to select two what we call noncontiguous blocks of cells.
- 01:08 But what about moving around with the mouse or a keyboard, rather?
- 01:16 Well we can arrow to the right hand side or to the left, up or
- 01:21 down using the arrow keys and that will allow us to move one cell at a time.
- 01:25 If I wanna select multiple cells, I'd hold down my Shift key and
- 01:29 I'll arrow down a couple of times and to the right.
- 01:32 Okay, so we can expand our selection holding down the Shift key.
- 01:36 Unfortunately, there's no way to select non-contiguous ranges using the keyboard,
- 01:42 because we would have to hold down the Ctrl key now, and then that's not really
- 01:45 gonna help us because it doesn't allow us to select another cell.
- 01:48 So if you want non-contiguous cells, you have to use the mouse and hold down Ctrl,
- 01:53 but if you want to select contiguous cells you could hold down Shift and
- 01:56 use the arrow keys.
- 01:59 Now let's take a look when we press arrow to the right, arrow to the right, arrow to
- 02:03 the right and Enter, you'll notice that the cursor drops down one cell.
- 02:08 Indeed, anytime I press Enter, the cursor drops down one cell.
- 02:12 It commits whatever's in the formula bar that we've been writing and
- 02:15 then drops one cell down.
- 02:16 But what happens if we start using the Tab key?
- 02:20 Notice that we're gonna start in E4 and we'll hit Tab, Tab,
- 02:24 Tab, end, Enter, and it drops us back to E5.
- 02:29 This is kind of like the carriage return for an old typewriter,
- 02:31 it would start you at the new line on the next line.
- 02:34 That only happens when you're actually using the Tab key, so if you go Tab,
- 02:39 Tab, Tab, Tab, Enter, it'll drop you back to E6.
- 02:44 Now, I'm gonna start from E4 again and
- 02:46 I'm gonna show you how something works a little differently.
- 02:49 If we use our right arrow three times, one, two, three, and
- 02:53 then we Tab three times, one, two, three.
- 02:57 Ask yourself now, where is this cursor gonna go when I press Enter?
- 03:05 Will it go to cell H5 or will it go to cell E5?
- 03:07 Now the answer is H5, and the reason is because when I use the arrow
- 03:13 keys to move across, that does not trigger the hard return action that goes and
- 03:17 starts in the next row, when I use the Tab keys it does.
- 03:21 So where this goes to, when you press Enter after tabbing is the cell
- 03:25 immediately below the cell that you started tabbing from,
- 03:29 and that's what we've got to remember about that.
- 03:31 The tab out functionality here is very, very useful for data entry because
- 03:36 if you start typing in numbers like 1, Tab, 2, Tab, 3, Tab, Enter.
- 03:41 At this point you can now keep on going with your data entry
- 03:45 to do whatever you need to do.
- 03:47 Tab, Tab, Enter will drop you down to the carriage return for the next line so
- 03:50 that makes life very, very easy.
- 03:54 Now what about inserting, deleting columns and rows?
- 03:57 That's something that we'd wanna do.
- 03:58 In this case here, what we'll do is we'll select one or
- 04:02 more of the columns, so I've clicked on header and
- 04:05 just left-clicked and dragged to the left to select multiple columns.
- 04:08 I'm gonna right-click on this column and I'm going to say Delete.
- 04:14 And that's how we delete rows or columns.
- 04:16 If I wanted to insert new data, I'll click on row 8, right-click and
- 04:22 say, Insert, and it will shift the data down from that point.
- 04:27 We can right- click, we can insert columns as well,
- 04:29 which will shift the data to the right as well.
- 04:33 Now, what if I didn't wanna do that?
- 04:35 What if I made a mistake?
- 04:37 Well, fortunately there is an undo key.
- 04:39 Now, there's a couple of different ways to trigger this.
- 04:42 The first one is to go up to your QAT and press this arrow here, and you'll notice
- 04:46 that Excel keeps track of a whole bunch of stuff that's actually going.
- 04:48 This is what we call the undo stack, and Excel will let us undo one individual
- 04:54 step at a time until it runs out of the things that it's actually been capturing.
- 05:00 We also have the redo functionality that allows us to
- 05:03 replay actions after we've undone them.
- 05:06 The other thing that I wanna show you us you can press Ctrl+Z.
- 05:09 This will also trigger the undo stack as well.
- 05:12 And Ctrl+Y will trigger the redo in order to actually clear those out, so
- 05:17 there's a couple keyboard shortcuts for you as well.
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