Selecting Cells Using the Keyboard with Excel

Some people operate under the assumption that a mouse is required to use Microsoft applications such as Excel. But as you'll learn, selecting cells is one of many tasks attainable from the keyboard.

Microsoft Excel offers many powerful tools for manipulating data. When you change a font, border, style, or alignment, your changes are applied to the selected cells. You may know how to select cells in a row or column using the shift key. You can hold down shift in combination with the arrow keys to select a group of cells, such as A1 through B4.

Sometimes, however, it may be necessary to select a group of cells that are not connected. Suppose that you want to apply a 14-point bold font and center the titles in both your heading rows at the top and your summary rows at the bottom. Without being able to select both of these sets of cells at once, you would essentially need to apply all of your formatting changes twice. Mouse users can hold down control and click on the cells to select them, but there is no keyboard equivalent to this process.

Luckily, Excel offers another alternative in the form of the go to command. You can use go to in the traditional sense to jump to a cell such as B3. Press Control+G to open the go to dialogue box and type B3. Press enter, and you are placed in this cell.

But the go to box offers much more than simple navigation. You can select multiple cells by separating them with a comma. So if you press Control+G and type B3,C5 and press enter, both cells B3 and C5 would be selected. The go to box is like many others in Excel which allows you to type in a range of cells. For instance, what if you actually wanted to select all of the cells from B3 through C5 instead of just the two cells? To do this, use a colon instead of a comma in the go to box, such as B3:C5.

Here's where the fun starts. You can type in a list of any combination of cells and ranges, and they will all be selected. If you were to type A1:I1,A6:I6,A23 into the box, you would select the first 9 columns in the top row, row 1, the same 9 columns in row 6, and the singular cell A23.

With all of these noncontiguous cells now selected, you can change font, borders, formatting, alignment, and a host of other options. Like the popular infomercial quote, "but wait, there's more!" Excel has some special options which allow you to select specific types of cells. For example, you can select all cells with formulas, all cells with comments, and many other similar sets. Again, press Control+G to jump to the go to box. Tab to get to the special button and press enter to select it. You'll see these special options in a list. Arrow to the one you want and press enter. Remember, you can improve your productivity by selecting multiple cells, and now you know an easy way to do it from the keyboard, regardless of whether or not your cells are adjoining.