Give your mouse a rest

 When I am teaching Excel I am always slightly surprised when I see how many people only use the mouse to select their data. If you are one of them, imagine the following situation :




It is nine o’ clock in the morning. Your freshly brewed coffee has just been served. You dealt with your incoming mails and you are ready to work on the excel output which has been downloaded overnight and which contains all the sales figures for the past five years. Now that you migrated to Office 2010 and that Excel can handle 1.048.576 lines instead of 65.536 (and 16.483 columns instead of 256), your boss wants to generate a pivot table, showing the years and months in order to assess the sales evolution over this past half decade. However, some of the data in the file has been wrongly defined and as there is some other data on top of the ones to be redefined, you cannot click on the column heading to select them all at one click of the mouse.


And so you click in the first cell and start dragging the mouse downwards, 652.533 lines long. But barely 50.000 lines down, the phone rings. You hesitate because you still have so many more lines to go but the phone keeps ringing and as you can see on the display that it is your boss, you cannot ignore it. You pick up the phone with your left hand and answer, still using your right one to keep dragging the mouse down. But your boss needs some information from a drawer at the other side of the office and you cannot do otherwise but to abort your action. Five minutes later you start all over again. This time you make it up till line 455.000 when an colleague opens your door a bit too enthusiastic. You jump up, you click where you should not click and you can start all over again. Each time you almost reach the end of your selection, you get interrupted. At the end of the day, just before it is time to leave, you finally manage to select all 652.533 lines but forgot why you were selecting them.


And that is why I call clicking and dragging a mouse to select data, occupational therapy!


Let me just share an easier mouse-less way which would have helped you to select the data in your column in less than a second. Press down the shift key (key with arrow up just above the Ctrl at the bottom right of the keyboard) and the Ctrl key at the same time and then, without releasing these buttons, press the down arrow key. The job is done. You can also use the other three arrows to select data upwards, to the left and to the right. But be careful, this only works if there are no blank cells in the column or line that you are selecting. If they are present you will have to repeat this action until you are at the bottom of your table.


Now, if you have to select a whole table (up till the last nonblank column and last nonblank line) you can just click in the table, then press Ctrl a. However, if you want to select the whole sheet, click in a blank cell, then press Ctrl a.


Complete lists of keyboard shortcuts for Excel can be found here : 2003 – 2007 - 2010