Excel has many useful shortcuts for selecting cells. This includes shortcuts for selecting rows, columns, groups of cells, and even the entire worksheet. Let’s take a look. When you’re selecting individual cells, you can use the arrow keys to move the selection around. If you hold down the shift key, and then press an arrow key, you can extend this selection in any direction without using the mouse. To select an entire column, press control-spacebar. Once you have the column selected, you can press shift and extend the selection to the right or the left using the arrow keys. To select an entire row, press shift-spacebar. As with columns, you can then hold the shift key down and use the arrow keys to extend the selection. When you are inside a group of cells, control-A will select the entire group. If you type control-A again, you’ll select the entire worksheet. If you want to select a row inside a group of cells, select the first cell, then hold down the shift key and the control key and press an arrow key. Excel will extend the selection to the first empty cell. This works for columns as well. Select a cell, then, holding down both the control key and the shift key, press an arrow key in the direction you would like to select. Keeping the shift and control key held down, you can type an arrow key to select the remaining cells in the group.
Dave Bruns
Hi - I’m Dave Bruns, and I run Exceljet with my wife, Lisa. Our goal is to help you work faster in Excel. We create short videos, and clear examples of formulas, functions, pivot tables, conditional formatting, and charts.
