Top Excel Shortcuts of 2024 Every Finance Pro Needs to Know!

What's your favorite Excel shortcut? If you have to pick one, what's that one you like or maybe use most? You can define favorite however you want.

I will say two. One is the shortcut. It's a shortcut. It's easy. It's the. I don't even know how to say the shortcut. I have to use the shortcut on my. On my keyboard to remember because it's so natural now. So it's when you hit shift control and to the right and shift control to the down. So that's where you carry all your formulas to the control E and the control R. So that's where you basically can carry your formula very quickly from the left to right and top to down. Those ones are my favorite and I could use the most.

Yeah, I've heard a few people say that. I'm not surprised, and I laugh when you said you have to do it. I worked with a guy who spent a long time in investment banking, and he told me at one point he'd be sitting in meetings after he'd done a ton of model building, and he would just be kind of automatically not even realizing. With his fingers doing different shortcuts. Yes. Kind of be tapping on the desk because it was such. Just built in memory. Control, open bracket. And then F5 enter. Control, open bracket will basically jump to what the formula is pulling from. And then F5 Enter brings you back to that original point. I think you are the third or fourth person who said that one. I think that's now number one on this show. As far as Excel shortcuts, it's either one or two. I love it. That's a pretty common. When I tell people about that, it completely changes their life. It changed mine. It's a. It's a great one. I'll even combine it with something. And I was doing this yesterday. Control, open bracket. And then if you're using Wall street macros, was it con as a control shift Y which highlights the cells. And so if I'm going through and I'm making sure everything's covered, that'll continuously do that. Love it. So, Wall street macros. Yeah. I'm taking it you use them. I love Wall street color coding. Nice. So what's the number one lesson you've learned during your career that's benefited you the most? It goes back to that. I have been a poor communicator in the past. I still am in a lot of ways, and I'm still learning a lot of ways. And along with that, communicating it's asking questions to understand what their standpoint is from. For example, a lot of times I'm a blue. When you look at the color code, I'm a blue. It's my favorite color, by the way, too. Yeah, BYU I know. I get it. Relationships are so important. And so when someone says something or does something, a lot of times I'm like, did I offend them? And so if I ask them, hey, I think this is what you're trying to communicate, then I can understand that in a certain way and then be able to communicate back to them in a way that we could really learn and move forward in a great progressive way. Love it.

Oh, I love this question. So, you know, watching your podcast, I. I have to say, out of all the questions, this has to be the most difficult question in, in terms of how to answer it, because how do you answer this? There's. There's a couple ways you can answer that. What, what is your shortcut based on frequency of use? Or what is your favorite shortcut based on, you know, uniqueness? For me, I go off of time saving. Time saving is a big one. And so for me, I would go with control backslash. I think it's an underrated shortcut. And of course, that is, you know, if you have your typical model build, you know, say five years, but it's all quarterly. Okay, you have 20, 20 columns. How do you review the model? And so a lot of times there are individual reviews of each cell, which, you know, could take a while. But of course, as we all know, control backslash, you just have to check the first cell to the left, highlight the row. Control backslash lets you know if all the formulas are consistent. If they're not consistent, let you know where the issue is, and so can save a lot of time. So much like with dynamic arrays, where you only have to build in the one formula in the one cell and not copy it across, so you're saving a lot of time. Dynamic arrays are great, but almost entirely all the models I receive from clients do not exhibit dynamic arrays. It's the traditional, traditional Excel formulas where you're building an Excel and so the utilization of, you know, formula checking on that, you have to use control backslash and so saves a lot of time. And probably second to that would be control shift backslash, where you want to make sure formula formulas are consistent, you know, from top to bottom. So typically what I'll do is I'll just highlight the entire grid. If the formulas are supposed to be consistent and well built. Control backslash control, shift, backslash. And then we just, you know, reviewed 40 cells, 50 cells, 80 cells and things like that. So from a time saving perspective, that would be my favorite.

I've got a pair. So the one I use all the time is Control left square bracket, F5 enter just to jump, you know, back to a link and then back to where you started from.

You know, I used to brag to my wife, you know, I type 50 words a minute. And she looked at me and just like laughed because I thought that was like, good. I am so slow when it actually gets down to the modeling and the typing that I don't use a lot of shortcuts and I could benefit from it, but my mind just won't let me go there. So I'm going to tell you, my favorite shortcut is alt f11 because that's how I get to my dev console and I am a VBA junkie.

There you go. That, that works. See, I'm not a big VBA guy. Everybody's different. So we'll go with Alt F11. I get it, love it.

So I'm a formatting geek. So I, I like, I think honestly, like half of a good spreadsheet is the formatting and presentation of it. And so I love all the formatting shortcuts, like the borders, you know, alt, hbp, hbo, HHN or whatever, you know, the hhf, hfc, like all, basically all the colors. I, I love, and I love everything.

On the whole menu.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alt H. Yeah, that's your friend.

That's where I live. Like, I think you can really change credibility wise. You can really, you know, make people think that this is a better model just because it's formatted more beautifully. So I live, I live in there. Honestly, I think Alt ass is probably the funniest one. But it's also pretty useful in a lot of contexts as well for just like sorting things.

Oh, yes. It took me a second. I'm like alt, that's data. Oh, S is sort. And then, yeah, sorting it. Yeah.

So if you wanted to like sort a range alphabetically or whatever, you type in ass into your computer and there you go.

I'll never think of it the same now. I hadn't quite put it together that way. Thanks a lot.

Favorite Excel shortcut is the combination of control open bracket followed by F5 enter, because control open bracket will let you trace a Link and then F5 Enter brings you right back to where you were. So it's a really quick way to jump around the models and do some auditing. So I have that. I do that pretty much in automatic all the time Control.

And you said left bracket and then F5 enter. Yes. All right, great. That's the first time we've had that that combination is the answer. So there you go. You get to be unique.

Yeah, I am probably super lame compared to some of your guests on the podcast here. I love Control T. I probably have used Control T to build tables more than any other shortcut. Of course, some of the, you know, easy ones to navigate up and down lots of rows and columns. But I would say probably the one that I consistently felt like was, you know, really helpful was making tables for sure. And that was just setting you up for success. I think a good habit to use Control T to remind yourself to make tables when you're building complex models.

Well, if it makes you feel better, you're in good company. I interviewed Ken Pulse, if you know who that is. He expert on Power Query.

Expert on Excel Power, yes.

He's been an Excel MVP for almost 20 years now. And one of the global experts. First training, one of the very first trainings ever was his on Power Query that was out there. And his favorite he mentioned was Control T. But what he said, he goes, my Control T is an Excel's Control T. Because he has his own tool, he's building at it. He's like, mine also allows you to. Requires you to rename the table an appropriate name. When you press Control T. And I'm like, I love it.

That's brilliant.

Control T. Yes, I love it. Tables guy. You know, I'm trying to shift, however, to Control L, because Control T doesn't work so good on a lot of browsers. And I think Excel online is. Is definitely catching some momentum. So you might want to try Control L here soon because Control T, I think it like opens a new tab or something like that on a lot of browsers. Not really web compatible. Shortcut. Yeah, I still try to avoid online Excel, though. I know it's catching up. I still find myself 99% desktop. So that's. That's a good trick to know. I would say alt O R E for adjusting column heights. So it's just when you want to create like a small little gap in between each of these, like sections of KPIs, for example, is one that you just think, oh, well, I always need to like go back and like manually drag down. But it's just if you can just do that and set them and especially set them all to the same height as well, rather than if they used to just do it and drag it manually, then I think that's my favorite. All righty. Nick. What's yours? F11. For making a graph out of a selected dataset. So? So I guess it's an oldie but a goodie. Yeah, that's a good one. I always think of alt F11 going into VBA when I hear F11. I just always think VBA, even though I know there's other uses.