In the world of financial modelling, you simply cannot survive without Excel shortcuts. To assist Excel users, Corality has compiled a list of productivity increasing Excel shortcuts.
Download your Excel shortcut cheat sheet, print it off and keep it handy. It will save you time and help you work more efficiently in Excel.
Benefits of Excel shortcuts
In financial modelling, there are certain operations that we need to perform time and time again. Without a thorough understanding of the different Excel shortcuts available to us we are forced to rely on our mouse, which makes us work slower, compared to performing the same tasks using keyboard shortcuts. Using shortcuts helps increase modelling productivity, save time and therefore money.
Top 5 most popular Excel shortcuts
- Select Area/All [Ctrl+A]. This is useful when you want to select either the entire sheet or the “current area” (for example, an entire area). If you are currently located somewhere on the worksheet (but not inside an area), then Ctrl+A will select the entire worksheet. However, if you are somewhere inside an area, then that entire area will be selected.
- Bold [Ctrl+B], Italics [Ctrl+I], Underline [Ctrl+U]. Using any of this is a quick way to apply basic formatting. However, for more control and consistency, we’d recommend the use of styles (see below).
- Cut [Ctrl+X], Copy [Ctrl+C], Paste [Ctrl+P]. These are used if you wish to cut / copy / paste cells. It can be useful to firstly select an area using Ctrl+A, and then cut/copy and paste this area elsewhere.
- Undo [Ctrl+Z], Redo [Ctrl+Y]. Undo is a very commonly used functionality because it enables us to revert the model back to an earlier state.
- Find [Ctrl+F], Replace [Ctrl+H]. Using these shortcuts automatically brings up the Find or Replace dialog boxes, which is useful when you want to find a particular text in an Excel spreadsheet.
Top 5 Excel shortcuts to increase productivity
- Filling across columns/rows [Ctrl+Shift+Right/Down then Ctrl+Right/Down]. It’s amazing how many people still fill across a row by copying the cell, then clicking and dragging across right / down and pasting. Using shortcuts is much faster. In this case, we are faced with two choices. Suppose you want to copy formulae down. To do this, you’d firstly need to select the appropriate area (Ctrl+Shift+Down) and then fill the formulae down (Ctrl+Down). If we wish to fill cells to the right, we would use the exact same steps, except that we would replace the Down arrow key by the Right arrow key.
- Select row [Shift+Space], select column [Ctrl+Space]. Useful for times when we want to select an entire row or column.
- Styling [Alt+’]. This combination brings up the styles dialog box, which is useful to help us quickly apply styles to our models.
- Go to the end of the worksheet [Ctrl+End]. This shortcut enables us to go to the end of the worksheet and is useful for determining whether a file size is padded out by unnecessary cells.
- Spell check [F7]. Amazing how many models we get which have basic spelling errors!
Excel tips and tricks
As part of the CPA Congress, Dr Liam Bastick, Director of Corality (Melbourne) was invited to deliver a series of presentations and workshops. One of presentations was “Excel secrets and shortcuts”, where Liam Bastick explained various tools to save time and increase productivity when working with Excel.
“I’m passionate about best practice financial modelling so it was great fun to present a session like this. I had nearly 100 accountants in the room, laptops at the ready, learning a truck load of new tips and tricks.” – Liam Bastick
You can view and download a condensed version of the presentation.
More links about Excel shortcuts
Here are some links to articles about Excel shortcuts:
- Best shortcut keys in Microsoft Excel
- Shortcut keys in Excel and VBA
- 200+ useful Keyboard Shortcuts for Excel 2007
Download your Excel shortcut cheat sheet now!
Post new comment