Excel and Sheets Keyboard Shortcuts Guide

Switching between your mouse and keyboard can be tiring when you’re working through large data sets and we believe you can save time by ensuring your fingers never leave the keyboard. Here are the keyboard shortcuts in both Excel and Sheets that we can’t live without.

Looking for a way to put this into practical application? Review our Ditch the Mouse template to practice navigating and formatting within your spreadsheets with just the use of the keyboard.

Excel Shortcuts on PC

• Learning new shortcuts – On a PC, when you hit Alt Excel will show additional letters at the top of the screen along the ribbon. These letters represent the beginning of a shortcut. If you know where something is found on the Ribbon, you can discover the shortcut by typing Alt and then typing the letter of the correct Ribbon tab (e.g. “H” for Home” or “A” for Data as shown in Excel) and then typing the remaining letters as shown by Excel for the action you’d like (e.g. “AC” for centering text” or “M” for removing duplicates).

Sheets Shortcuts

Most formatting can be done without ever touching the mouse! To use shortcuts:

• Search bar – Option + / will bring up the formatting search bar on a Mac. Alt + / on a PC. See our step-by-step guide here on quickly assessing search in Sheets.
  • From here, you can search for whatever formatting you’re looking for by typing relevant words and using the arrow keys (↓ ↑) to make the relevant selection. Examples include “text blue”, “highlight gray”, “top border”, “align center”
  • You can also access actions through this search. Examples include “paste values”, “remove duplicates”, “sort range”, “create filter”
• Sheets will also remind you of the shortcut if one exits (e.g. if you search for “Align center”, you’ll see ⌘+Shift+E (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+E (PC) in gray text to the right of the center option reminding you that you could use that key combination to center text)