Timely Tips© Volume 2, Issue 9; September 2005 -- Stumping “The Jump” Part II: A Version for Excel Users

Dear Friends,

Last month, I shared a very handy tip on how to help save some time by avoiding “jump” – that annoying habit of today’s super-fast computers to jump you much further into documents that you are editing than you would like. You usually run into this problem when trying to select text or data into your clipboard or for other manipulations.

Gary Kapanowski, a good friend and colleague, wrote back with an equally helpful little keystroke trick that can especially help Excel and other spreadsheet users, but can also help MS Word and other word processing program users.

When working in a spreadsheet, get your cursor in or near a section of data that you would like to select. Then, press the “End” key one time, and then hold the “Shift” key and use the directional arrows. You can toggle up, down, left or right, and highlight the cells (and only the cells) that you would like to select. This can be very useful when cutting or copying and pasting both actual data, as well as cells that have defined functions and calculations – potentially a real time saver.

Out of curiosity, I tried to see what happened if you followed the same steps in MS Word. Using the “End” key typically just jumps you to the end of the line of text that you are on. But interestingly, if you hold the “Shift” key down (regardless of whether or not you just pushed the “End” key), and then use the arrow keys, you can either select text in the lines directly above or below your cursor location (up/down arrow keys) or directly to the right or left of your cursor location (using the right/left arrow keys). This can be very handy for specific editing/copying/cutting functions.

So, now you’ve got a few new keystroke tips that will hopefully save you quite a bit of time moving forward. I recommend that you go and try them out and add them to your “computer skills toolkit”. Until next time, Stay Timely!