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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
Download the Excel workbook used in the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Navigation.xlsx17 KB
Quick reference
Navigation
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 In this video we're gonna look at how to move around inside the Excel grid.
- 00:09 You might be thinking really a whole video just for that?
- 00:11 But there's actually lots of ways.
- 00:14 The first and easiest is to mouse over the cell you want and just left-click it.
- 00:18 Nice and simple.
- 00:19 But what if the cell you want is actually not in the viewable window?
- 00:24 Well, you can use the scroll bar to scroll down to it.
- 00:27 Or you can use your wheel on your mouse to roll down to find the cell you want.
- 00:32 I can click it.
- 00:32 You'll notice that I'm in cell E39, and when I roll my mouse wheel back up or
- 00:37 use the scroll bar, you can see based on the name box that I'm
- 00:40 still in cell e39 even though it's off screen.
- 00:43 So if we need to go and select a cell, that's one way to do it.
- 00:46 What if I wanna select multiple cells?
- 00:49 When I click on a cell I always get one.
- 00:51 But if I left click and
- 00:52 drag, you'll notice that I can actually pick up more cells.
- 00:56 The key to recognize here though is you're always gonna get a rectangle.
- 01:00 It could be a perfectly square rectangle or it could be short and
- 01:05 wide or tall and narrow, but it's always rectangular.
- 01:09 What if I want to select these cells plus I wanna select some more cells over here,
- 01:14 but they're not in what we call a contiguous block, so they're not together.
- 01:18 Well if I hold down my control key, I can actually left click and
- 01:22 drag, and I'll get more selections.
- 01:26 Now, one of the things that happens when you work with this though,
- 01:28 is you always end up picking up, shoot, I didn't mean to grab those two cells.
- 01:32 So how do you actually get those out of the selection?
- 01:36 And this is a cool thing.
- 01:37 In Excel 2019 and higher, you can actually hold down your control key and
- 01:41 just left click on those guys and it will deselect them.
- 01:44 Now that's not available in Excel 2016 and earlier.
- 01:46 It's a new feature which is kind of cool.
- 01:49 What if I want to select these cells and I don't want to use the mouse?
- 01:53 I'm going to hold down my shift key and I'm going to arrow down and
- 01:56 you'll notice that this actually expands the selection as I arrow down and
- 01:59 right, making that contiguous block.
- 02:02 Unfortunately, there's no way to make a non-contiguous block.
- 02:06 So this point if I want to select other cells, I would have to hold down my
- 02:09 control key and use the mouse in order to actually use those.
- 02:13 But the cool thing is, at least to start with here,
- 02:17 I can hold down my shift key and arrow around and get a big block of cells.
- 02:20 And most of time what we're trying to do in Excel is within that main block range.
- 02:26 Now, one of the things that we know is if we hit the enter key,
- 02:30 our cursor moves down.
- 02:32 But what happens if we hit the tab key?
- 02:35 Well it moves across.
- 02:36 You'll notice I can tab across three times.
- 02:39 And when I hit enter now, it goes back to where I started tabbing,
- 02:43 which is kind of interesting.
- 02:45 And this is actually really useful if you're doing things like data entry.
- 02:48 I could say 1, 2, 3 and enter,
- 02:50 and it kind of works like the old carriage return on a classic typewriter.
- 02:54 So if I'm doing data entry,
- 02:55 this is actually a really efficient way to actually go and make work happen.
- 03:00 Now what I'm going to do right now, though,
- 03:01 is I'm going to show you a little difference in behavior here.
- 03:04 I'm going to use my right arrow key.
- 03:06 And I'm going to arrow over three times and now I'm gonna go tab,
- 03:10 tab, tab, so I've gone right arrows for the first ones and tabs for the next.
- 03:16 And when I hit enter, where is my cursor gonna go?
- 03:19 Is it gonna go to E10 or will it go somewhere else?
- 03:24 And the answer is it's going to go to H10.
- 03:28 And the reason being is because I used the arrow key to move across these cells and
- 03:32 I started tabbing from this area.
- 03:35 So it always line wraps to where the tabs started.
- 03:39 So that's something to keep in mind here.
- 03:42 That using the tab and enter is one of the quickest ways to actually
- 03:46 do data entry because it automatically gives you that hard return piece that
- 03:49 wraps you around to the next area.
- 03:52 What if I want to delete columns?
- 03:55 Well, I can grab a single column and right click and delete it.
- 04:01 Or I can left click and grab two or more columns,
- 04:04 making that nice contiguous block, right click and delete.
- 04:10 If I wanted to do the same thing with rows, I could do that here, but
- 04:13 in this case what I am going to do is I am gonna insert and
- 04:16 you'll notice that it's actually gonna shift row 15 down.
- 04:21 And now I'm trying to decide hmm, I didn't really want to do that so
- 04:25 can I undo what I just did and the answer is yes.
- 04:27 There's a couple of different ways.
- 04:29 We could undo it by clicking on the undo on the quick access toolbar and
- 04:33 you'll notice that there's an entire stack of things that gets recorded here.
- 04:37 For right now I'm going to click undo this one and
- 04:41 I'm now going to press Ctrl + Z which is the keyboard shortcut to do undo.
- 04:46 You'll notice that now the redo button has also shown up here and
- 04:50 will stay there until I do another command that actually wipes out that stack.
- 04:54 So if I wanted to redo the command, I could actually click on this little arrow,
- 04:58 or I could press control-Y to actually execute the redo action as well.
- 05:03 Ctrl + Z is the most pressed keyboard shortcut in Excel because we always
- 05:07 make mistakes and
- 05:08 wanna undo them so it's one that you definitely want to have in your arsenal.
- 05:11 And control-Y will redo things as well.
- 05:14 So that's how we go about moving through the Excel grid.
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