Basic Shortcuts

To Navigate:

We can either use the arrow keys OR:

• Tab: Move right
• Shift+Tab: Move left
• Enter: Move down
• Shift+Enter: Move up

Selecting

• Hold Shift then type arrow keys to select the cells you want to focus on (note the green border).
  • To do something to a particular cell in your selected cells, you can type enter or hold shift then type enter to select then change the value of a particular cell.
• Ctrl+arow: Selects the next cell at the start and end of each range separated by empty rows or columns (like selecting the next "paragraph" if you will).
• Ctrl+Shift+arrow: Like the shortcut above, but it also selects all the cells (not one particular cell).

• ctrl+space: Selects the entire column.
• shift+space: Selects the entire row.

Others

• F1: Opens help
• Ctrl+z: Undo
• Ctrl+y: Redo
• Shift+F10: Right click
• Ctrl+Home: Returns to A1 (the very first cell/origin)
• Ctrl+Alt+Plus: Zooms in
• Ctrl+Alt+Minus: Zooms out
• F2: The cursor shows up in the selected cell. The cell is not cleared when there is data in that cell. (unlike Enter).
• Alt: Shows all the options in the ribbon menu
• Ctrl+;: Fill the cell with the current date
• Ctrl+Shift+;: Fill the cell the current time

Some Jargons/Stuff to Know

• Workbook: The Excel file
• Worksheet: The tabs in the workbook
• Ribbon: The thing the user sees at the top of the window

To insert a column, a row, or a cell...

When you right click a cell, you have the "insert" opetion. If you click it, It will show this:

A shortcut to do this is to type Ctrl+Shift+. It will pop up the same window.

You get to shift cells in the same row to the right or down.

You can also insert an entire row (it will insert a row above the current selected cell with the green border)...

Or you can insert a whole new column to the left of the current selected cell. It will push all cells to the right.

Understanding How Columns Work in Excel

Notice how the rows are numerical while the columns are alphabetical. The columns' labels follow a hexavigesimal pattern (note that 0 is not inclusive since Excel's columns are offset by 1):

Decimal	Hexavigesimal
1	A
2	B
3	C
...	...
25	Y
26	Z
27	AA
28	AB
...	...
701	ZZ
702	AAA
703	AAB
...	...
16,383	XFC
16,384	XFD

The range of the of the rows is [1, 1,048,576] while the range of the columns is [A, XFD]

We combine these labels to form the names of the cells. As we may well know, the first cell in the upper left corner is called A1 (note the Name Box right below the clipboard).

With that out of the way, we can now write equations to the cell.

Writing Equations

To write an equation, we use the equals sign to prompt Excel to use the SUM function. Excel uses the SUM function by default unless otherwise specified.

Excel is smart enough to know if it is dealing with dates or numbers.

If we have two numbers in A1 and A2, we can type = and the names of those cells with the plus sign in between. It is case-insensitive.

=A1+A2 or =a1+a2

Or we can type the SUM function itself. Its only purpose to add numbers in a range of cells.

With SUM, we can include a range of cells like C1:C5 inside its argument. It is a much neater way to add numbers instead of specifying their names one by one ("=A1+A2+A3+...").

To demonstrate:

Another way to add the numbers in a column is by holding alt and typing + together. Excel is smart enough to show a desired equation:

Excel supports +, -, *, /, (), and ^.