Five Excel Shortcuts Worth Learning
Not fifty shortcuts nobody remembers. Five I actually use most days, and why each one earns its place.
By Shehryar Hassan, Microsoft 365 & Azure Consultant
I'm not going to give you fifty shortcuts nobody remembers. Here are five I actually use most days, and why each one earns its place.
Ctrl + Arrow keys to jump around a big sheet
Instead of scrolling through thousands of rows, hold Ctrl and press an arrow key to jump straight to the edge of your data in that direction. Ctrl + Down from the top of a column takes you to the last filled cell before a gap. It sounds small, but on a sheet with real data in it, this alone saves you from a lot of scrolling.
Ctrl + Shift + L to turn on filters instantly
This toggles filter arrows on and off for whatever range you've selected. I use it constantly when I get a spreadsheet from someone else and want to quickly see what values exist in a column, or narrow down to just the rows I care about, without clicking through the ribbon.
Alt + = to autosum
Select a column or row of numbers, press Alt and the equals key, and Excel writes the SUM formula for you and picks it up automatically. It guesses the range correctly most of the time. When it doesn't, you can still adjust it before hitting enter, but it saves typing out =SUM() by hand over and over.
F4 to repeat your last action
This one surprises people the most. If you just bolded a cell, or changed a fill color, or deleted a row, pressing F4 does that exact same thing again to whatever's currently selected. Formatting twenty cells the same way, one at a time, goes from tedious to quick.
Ctrl + T to turn a range into a proper table
This is the one that changed how I use Excel the most. Select your data and press Ctrl + T, and Excel turns it into a structured table with sorting, filtering, and banded rows built in. Formulas inside a table auto fill down new rows, references become readable names instead of cell coordinates, and the whole thing just behaves better than a plain range once your data grows.
None of these require memorizing a huge list. Pick two you don't already use and build them into your habits this week. The rest will stick once these feel automatic, and in my experience that's a better way to actually learn shortcuts than trying to absorb them all at once from a cheat sheet.
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