The Excel keyboard shortcuts to practise first
Nine shortcuts that do most of the work in a spreadsheet, in the order to learn them, with a drill for each that you can run on any sheet.
The people who are fast in Excel are not fast at typing formulas. They are fast at moving: getting to the cell, selecting the range, filling the column, without ever reaching for the mouse. That comes from a small number of shortcuts pressed thousands of times, not a long list read once. Here are the nine to learn first, in the order they pay off, each with a drill you can run on any spreadsheet.
Every combination below is written as it is pressed on a Windows keyboard. On a Mac, Ctrl is ⌘ in almost every case.
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Down Arrow keys
Move the selection one cell.
Drill. Put the mouse out of reach. Fill a 3×3 block with numbers using only the arrows, Enter and Tab.
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Shift Down Shift + arrow
Grow the selection instead of moving it. The cell you started on stays inside.
Drill. From any cell, select exactly four cells down and three across, without the mouse.
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Ctrl Down Ctrl + arrow
Jump to the last filled cell in that direction — the edge of the data.
Drill. On a column of a hundred rows, get from the top to the bottom in one press. Then find the gap it stops at.
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Ctrl Shift Down Ctrl + Shift + arrow
Jump and select together: a whole column of data in one movement.
Drill. Select a column of data from its header to its last row, then press Ctrl+C.
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Ctrl Home Ctrl + Home
Back to A1 from anywhere.
Drill. Scroll to row 2000, then get home in one press.
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Ctrl D Ctrl + D
Fill the selection down from its top cell, moving relative references as it goes.
Drill. Write one formula at the top of a column, select down to the last row with Ctrl+Shift+Down, then Ctrl+D.
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F2 F2
Edit the selected cell in place, with the cursor at the end.
Drill. Fix a typo in a long formula without retyping it, and without the mouse.
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F4 F4
Cycle a reference through $A$1, A$1, $A1 and A1 while editing.
Drill. Write =B4*D3, then press F4 with the cursor on D3 until it reads $D$3.
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Ctrl Z Ctrl + Z
Undo. The one that makes the others safe to try.
Drill. Press Ctrl+D on the wrong column on purpose, then undo it.
How to actually learn them
One at a time, for a day each. Pick the next shortcut on the list, and for that day refuse to do its job any other way — if you catch your hand on the mouse, take it off and press the keys. A shortcut is learned by the hand, not the memory, and the hand learns in about a day of honest use. Nine shortcuts, nine days, and the mouse becomes something you use for charts.
If you would rather be told when you get one wrong, the first module on this site has a lesson that watches for the combination itself: it moves the selection the way Excel would, and marks the press.