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About this lesson

Utilize the keyboard or mouse to select cells and ranges in a spreadsheet.

Exercise files

Download this lesson’s exercise file.

Navigating the Interface.xlsx
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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
    On a Mac: hold down the ⌘ (Command) 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 (or ⌘+Z on a Mac)
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  • 00:04 All right, let's talk about how to navigate the actual spreadsheet itself.
  • 00:08 The easiest way by far, if you want to go and select a cell or multiple cells,
  • 00:12 is to grab your mouse and just go and left-click the individual cell, or
  • 00:17 left-click and drag to get multiple cells, okay?
  • 00:20 What I've got here is if I click on cell F8, I have a single cell selected.
  • 00:26 If I left-click and drag, I can select what we call a contiguous block of cells.
  • 00:32 And what a contiguous block is it's a block that goes from the top left of
  • 00:36 the selection down to the bottom right of the selection with no gaps in between.
  • 00:40 So we're getting that entire rectangle of data.
  • 00:43 We refer to that as a contiguous block of cells.
  • 00:46 This is very, very easy to do with the mouse.
  • 00:48 As I say, just left-click and drag in order to grab your selection.
  • 00:51 But what if you want to grab a non-contiguous block of cells?
  • 00:56 To do that, we're going to select the first cell that we want,
  • 01:00 we're going to hold down the Ctrl key,
  • 01:03 and we're going to click on the other cells or ranges of cells that we may want.
  • 01:08 Now, again, I'm still holding down the Ctrl key as I go through left click and
  • 01:12 drag to grab other items for my selection, okay,
  • 01:16 holding down the Ctrl key the entire time.
  • 01:18 When I'm done, I can let the Ctrl key go, and at this point,
  • 01:22 I have a non-contiguous block of cells selected.
  • 01:25 Now, the question is, what happens if I've accidentally selected a couple
  • 01:30 more cells that I didn't want in this selection?
  • 01:33 As of Office 2019, you can hold down your Ctrl key and
  • 01:37 click on the cells that you do not want in your selection.
  • 01:41 And they don't need to be unwound in the same order either, okay?
  • 01:45 You can go and pick out whichever ones you don't want, still holding down the Ctrl
  • 01:48 key the entire time, and it will deselect those cells as well, okay?
  • 01:52 So it's a handy little tip here if you're trying to deal with those kind of things.
  • 01:56 Now, what if you don't want to use the mouse?
  • 01:58 Let's go back to F8 here.
  • 02:00 I'm going to hold down this time my Shift key, and I'm going to arrow down, and
  • 02:04 then I'm going to arrow to the right, okay?
  • 02:07 So Shift and arrows will allow you to go and
  • 02:11 extend a contiguous range via the keyboard.
  • 02:15 There is no way to create a non-contiguous block of cells using the keyboard, okay?
  • 02:21 So if you're going to do that, you need to use the Ctrl key and your mouse.
  • 02:25 All right, let's talk a little bit about data here as well.
  • 02:27 So I want to enter some data and some cells, but
  • 02:29 I want to show you what happens with the keyboarding.
  • 02:32 So I'm going to go and
  • 02:32 just sort of replicate some of the stuff on the table on the side.
  • 02:35 So if I enter some data and I press Enter,
  • 02:37 you'll notice that the cell moves down, okay?
  • 02:40 So if I go and put in Football and hit Enter, it's going to drop down,
  • 02:44 which probably makes some sense.
  • 02:46 If I go back here and enter Soccer, and I hit Tab,
  • 02:50 the cell will actually move across.
  • 02:53 So I'm going to type in 56.
  • 02:55 I'm going to put Tab 8.99.
  • 02:57 But instead of pressing Tab at this point in time,
  • 03:00 what I'm going to do is I'm going to press Enter.
  • 03:03 And the question is, where do you think the cell will go?
  • 03:05 Well, so far, we've seen that Enter drops down by one cell, so
  • 03:08 you'd probably expect that it would go to H10, but it actually doesn't.
  • 03:12 When I hit Enter, it kind of works like the carriage return on a typewriter.
  • 03:17 It actually goes back to the beginning of the line.
  • 03:19 So we can put in Football, we can type in 84, 70.97.
  • 03:23 I'm hitting Tab, Tab and Enter, and it goes down to the next line as well.
  • 03:28 Now, the key trick, though, that you want to remember about this, let me just
  • 03:31 put in Basketball for a second here, and I'm going to press Enter to go down.
  • 03:35 I'm now going to come back up here, I'm just using my arrow keys to move around.
  • 03:39 I'm now going to press 21, Tab, 7.25, Enter, and it goes down below the 21.
  • 03:46 That carriage return always goes down below the cell that you
  • 03:50 started tabbing from.
  • 03:52 That's the important thing that you want to remember about this one
  • 03:56 here, okay?
  • 03:56 Next thing I want to show you is we can right-click and
  • 04:00 insert columns, or we can right-click and insert rows, okay?
  • 04:04 So that's nice and easy to do.
  • 04:06 We can also go and right-click on a row and Delete it as well.
  • 04:12 And what if I want to undo, though, an action I wasn't really happy with?
  • 04:16 Well, there's a couple of different options for this.
  • 04:18 The first one, the one that I use the most, is Ctrl+Z.
  • 04:22 That will actually bring back the row, because I just deleted it, it says, oops,
  • 04:25 you didn't mean to do that.
  • 04:26 If I press Ctrl+Z again, it's going to unwind the insert action.
  • 04:31 We can actually see what happens here based on the undo cells, or
  • 04:36 the undo option here.
  • 04:38 This gives us our entire chain of everything we've done.
  • 04:41 And if we actually go and click on this, it will back it up one step,
  • 04:45 or we can actually move multiple steps back in the undo stack.
  • 04:49 So I'm just going to go and click on this one, I'm going to click on this one.
  • 04:51 And you can see we can actually roll all of these actions back as well.
  • 04:55 The keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl+Z.
  • 04:58 Ctrl+Y will actually redo.
  • 05:01 And there is also in your quick access toolbar, the option to add a redo button,
  • 05:05 if you would prefer to have that up here as well, okay?
  • 05:08 Okay, so those are the quick tips on how to start working through the user
  • 05:12 interface both with your mouse and with your keyboard.

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