Marquee Tuesday Timesavers: Quick Timesaving Excel Tips

As part of our series on LinkedIn, Tuesday Timesavers are quick tips to help make your daily Excel tasks faster and easier.

Tuesday Timesaver #1: Using borders around your Excel tables? Save time when editing or expanding the table. First, make all changes, then highlight the whole table (CTRL + A), remove all existing borders (CTRL + SHIFT + _), and finally, redo the outline border (CTRL + SHIFT + &).

Tuesday Timesaver #2: To copy and paste a cell in Excel a single step, highlight the starting cell and the target cells using SHIFT + Arrow key(s). CTRL+D will copy down; CTRL+R will copy right. But to copy just one cell there is no need to initially highlight. Simply put your cursor one cell below the cell to be copied and hit CTRL+D (or one cell to the right and hit CTRL+R).

Tuesday Timesaver #3: Looking to delete/add rows or columns quickly to your spreadsheet? Highlight a row using SHIFT + SPACEBAR or a column using CTRL + SPACEBAR. To delete the highlighted row or column, use CTRL + “-“. To add a row above the highlighted row or to add a column to the left of the highlighted column, use CTRL + SHIFT + “+”. Note that if you’re using the “+” on the number pad on a full keyboard to add rows or columns, you don’t need to hold SHIFT.

Tuesday Timesaver #4: Looking to jump to a precedent cell quickly in Excel? For instance, if you click on a cell that contains =Sheet1!G20, press “CTRL + [” to jump directly to Sheet1!G20. To return to your original formula cell, hit F5 and then press ENTER.

Tuesday Timesaver #5: Looking to quickly enter today’s date and time in Excel? Enter the current date using “CTRL + ;” and then press ENTER. For the current time, use “CTRL + SHIFT + ;” and then press ENTER. To enter both, use “CTRL + ;” then SPACE and then “CTRL + SHIFT + ;” before you press ENTER.

Tuesday Timesaver #6: Looking to add a comment in Excel? SHIFT + F2 will create a new comment or open the existing comment on a given cell. To return to regular Excel, press ESC twice. To quickly delete this new comment, press ALT + R + D.

Tuesday Timesaver #7: Looking to quickly group rows/columns in Excel? Highlight the rows (SHIFT + SPACEBAR) or columns (CTRL + SPACEBAR) and then hit ALT + SHIFT + RIGHT ARROW to group. To ungroup, select the cells and hit ALT + SHIFT + LEFT ARROW.

Tuesday Timesaver #8: Looking to quickly format numbers in Excel? Select the desired cells and then hit CTRL + SHIFT + 1 to format as a “Number” with 2 decimal places and 1000 separator (,). You can also quickly change to other standard formats by replacing the “1” with “2” for “Time”, “3” for “Date”, “4” for “Currency”, “5” for “Percentage”, and “6” for “Scientific Notation”.