Benefits of using Excel shortcuts: get your shortcut sheet

Corality’s Excel shortcut sheet received lots of positive feedback at the CPA Congress in Sydney and created interest amongst professional modellers and novices alike. This Excel shortcut sheet is yet another one of our free materials we’re proud to share as part of our passion to spread best-practice modelling.

Download your copy of Corality’s Excel shortcut sheet.

Benefits of using 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 Excel shortcuts will help you:

• Increase your modelling productivity and save time and therefore money
• Reduced your dependence on the computer mouse which can improve your work posture and prevent strain associated with RSI

Top 5 most popular Excel shortcuts

1. 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.
2. 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).
3. Cut [Ctrl+X], Copy [Ctrl+C], Paste [Ctrl+V]. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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

1. 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.
2. Select row [Shift+Space], select column [Ctrl+Space]. Useful for times when we want to select an entire row or column.
3. Styling [Alt+’]. This combination brings up the styles dialog box, which is useful to help us quickly apply styles to our models.
4. 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.
5. Spell check [F7]. Amazing how many models we get which have basic spelling errors!

More handy tips about Excel shortcuts

There are plenty of articles about the benefits of using Excel shortcuts, here are some of the articles we find interesting.

• Best shortcut keys in Microsoft Excel
• Shortcut keys in Excel and VBA 
• 200+ useful Keyboard Shortcuts for Excel 2007 
• 187 useful Keyboard Shortcuts for Excel 2010

Download your copy of Corality’s Excel shortcut sheet now!

COMMENTS