Hidden Key-stroke short-cuts in MS Excel

[TerryMcK]

Does anybody have a complete list of all the keystroke shortcuts in MS Excel? I remember some, but have forgotten many, and MS doesn't display a lot of them in the menus anymore.

The biggest one I miss is a keystroke to clear contents of multiple selected cells -- instead of going to Clear in the menu. The PC version uses Delete for this; in the Mac version Delete clears one cell.

Terry

[karavite]

Hi - not sure where you can get the complete set, but this may help: http://web.mit.edu/is/help/officex/newfeatures.html

"Customizable keyboard shortcuts: Set the keyboard shortcuts to function as they did in Excel 98, or customize each one to your personal preferences. You can assign keyboard shortcuts to commands that do not already have them or remove keyboard shortcuts you don't want. If you don't like the changes you make, you can return to the default keyboard shortcut settings at any time."

Also:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/product...mKeyboards.xml

"Assign a keyboard shortcut

1. On the Tools menu, click Customize.
2. At the bottom of the Customize dialog box, click Keyboard.
3. In the Customize Keyboard dialog box, select a category from the Categories list to see the commands and other items associated with that category.
4. Click the command you want in the list to the right.

Note** If there is currently a keyboard shortcut associated with the command, it is displayed in the Current keys box.
5. Click inside the Press new shortcut key box.
6. Press the key combination you want to use for the command.
7. Click Add.
8. After you have finished assigning all the shortcuts you want, click OK.

Note** If you change your mind now or later, you can reset the shortcuts by clicking Reset All."

Also, Unsanity has an app to create keyboard shortcuts that you can check out - I haven't used it yet. I often use QuicKeys - for example, I was so sick of paste special not defualting to unformatted text (what I always seem to want to do) that I created a QuicKeys shortcut for this that I use in Word, Excel and Mail."

Hey - I still use the original Office X - service pack 1 and Delete will delete multple cells. The little Delete over the arrow keys, not the big Delete at the end of the top row (to the right of 8 9 0 - =). The Big Delete does just what you say, where as the small Delete does what you want.

[karavite]

P.S. In 1999 I compiled an index of all keyboard shortcuts for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and IE. I did this for people who are blind and use a screen reader application. I was horrified at what a complete mess I found. First, there were something like 900 across all the apps which narrowed down to about 400 when you removed "duplicates" - There were many shortcuts for the same item - for example 4 ways to Save as. I think this was left over from the time when MS was beating up all its competitors and included their shortcuts in Office to make "switching" easier for users of Word Perfect, Lotus 123 and many other dead programs. In addition, the same shortcuts were used for different functions in the different Office apps. Some of these were understandable - Excel and Word do not do the same things - but others were absurd. One more rant - the old Office help files would often list/organize keyboard shortcuts not by some function, but by the keys used! For example, all keys using Shift or Shift + Function Key... when the actual functions of shortcuts within these categories had nothing to do with each other!

Any way, it was interesting to see what a disaster had occured over so many years. Whatever you come with on your own will probably be much better!