Excel — Keyboard Shortcuts to select cells

Do you find yourself using your mouse to try and select a certain range of cells in Excel, only to find you just missed the end cell and need to start over? Or maybe you have a long worksheet, and you scroll and scroll to get to the bottom? Never fear — keyboard shortcuts are here.

#1 — let’s select a range of cells using SHIFT.

Click on your first cell > hold down SHIFT > Click on your last cell

This works for columns, rows and both. See example Green is starting cell and Blue is ending cell. The gray box is the selection.

Select Column

Select Row

Select Rows & Columns

#2 — Selecting on cells above or below and cells left or right

Click on your first cell > Press CTRL + SHIRT + ARROW (Direction you want selection)

Here is an example to illustrate how this works. I have a spreadsheet full of data with a few blank cells. Green is the first cell.

The First time you press CTRL + SHIFT + DOWN ARROW it selects everything until the first blank cell.

Selecting cells through blank

Press CTRL + SHIFT + DOWN ARROW again and it grabs the next cell different cell (or the next one with data).

Select next set of cells

Continue pressing DOWN ARROW until you reach the end of your desired selection.

Select all cells in column

Now that you have your selection highlighted you can RIGHT Click for menu options or just Keyboard you desired action CTRL + C for Copy or CRTL + X for Cut are common actions. You can also format your selection with CTRL + B for Bold as an example.