Ever find yourself doing the same thing in Excel over and over again? If only there was a single keyboard shortcut to repeat your last action.

Fortunately there is, and it’s the subject of today’s video!

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Full Video Transcript:

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. There is a single keyboard shortcut that can be used to repeat the last action, whatever that action may be, and in this video, I’m going to teach you the least known and most helpful formatting shortcut.

F4 is one of my favorite shortcuts, because it’s extremely versatile and can be used to do pretty much anything. Some great examples are to repeat Insert Cells, repeat Highlight Cells, or repeat copying and pasting of formatting.

We’ll go through those in a second, but really, think of it as just the Fantastic Four fixing broken records. Why broken records? Because it’s happening over and over again. And Fantastic Four, F4. I mean, that’s pretty cool.

So, what you want to keep in mind is it’s the same shortcut for both PC and Mac, and it’s one of those rare times, so really enjoy that.

There’s one drawback here, which is that you might have a situation where you can kind of lose your work as you go if you do something in the middle. So, if I’m actually taking this, and let’s say pasting the formatting here all at once, I’m going to now repeat that action over here, over here. And notice how it’s doing this, but if I do something else and I try and repeat now, it won’t do it because I did something recently. So, keep that in mind as you go through.

I’ve created some exercises to practice and really internalize these shortcuts. So, go ahead and make the left section here match with the section on the right. So, use that Insert Cells to CTRL + + (plus) shift cells to the right, and now, instead of doing that same shortcut, just hit your F4, F4. Same idea here. It will remember exactly what you did.

Even cooler is that if you choose it a little differently, and you do CTRL + + (plus) over here, and do Down, it’s going to remember that as opposed to to the right. A nice little nugget for you to enjoy.

Same concept with repeat Highlight Cells. As soon as you highlight it, you can actually repeat that, which was then your last step. So, highlight it again and hit F4, it’ll apply to that new selection. You get the idea. Enjoy and actually practice this until you get it.

Don’t forget to visit test.excelshir.com where you can download these exercises, along with other free resources such as keyboard shortcut cheat sheets for both PC and Mac.

Thanks for watching, and see you next time. Don’t forget to share the Excel love. You thought I was going to forget, didn’t you?