Tag: Excel Shortcuts

Posted on

Ref 0001 Excel Shortcuts: How to Customize Mac Keyboard Shortcuts for Microsoft Excel

Download FREE, Printable Step-by-Step Guides

Step-by-Step Guide: Customize Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

  1. Go to System Preferences.
    • Shir Tip: Use Spotlight Search to open System Preferences.
      • Press COMMAND + SPACE to open “Spotlight Search.”
      • Type “sys” and it will most likely autofill “System Preferences”.
      • Press RETURN.
  2. Click on the “Keyboard” icon.
  3. Click on the “Shortcuts” tab on the top of the window.
  4. Click on “App Shortcuts” on the left panel.
  5. Click on the “+” (plus) button to add a new shortcut.
    • Choose “Microsoft Excel” from the “Application” dropdown list. NOTE: If Microsoft Excel does NOT appear in the list, you might need to select “Other” at the bottom and find it in your Applications folder.
    • Type in the exact name of the menu command you want to add. For example, if you want to create a shortcut to zoom, you must type in “Zoom…” with the 3 dots, since that is how it appears under the “View” menu in Excel.
    • Click in the “Keyboard Shortcut” text box, and then actually type the shortcut (it will fill in the correct symbols for the keys you are using. For example: ⌃⇧Q for CTRL + SHIFT + Q).
    • Click the “Add” button.
  6. Test the shortcut you just created to make sure it is working the way you want it to.
  7. Eat a plum, cause you are done! 🙂

 

Full Video Transcript:

Here are step-by-step instructions how to customize keyboard shortcuts on the Mac from Microsoft Excel.

Step 1 is go to your System Preferences. Once you’re here, go ahead and go to the Keyboard section.

Then you’re going to go on to the Shortcuts tab on top. Once you’re there, you’ll get a whole bunch of choices here on the left. Choose App Shortcuts, and then find Microsoft Excel Mac 2016.

If it’s not there, you’ll have to go ahead and hit a + and find the application in a list, and then actually make sure, this is where it gets tricky, type in the exact name of the menu command you want to add. Under File, under Edit, under essentially any of those top menu items, type it out exactly as it appears, even if there’s a “…”, that’s how you have to have it.

Once you do, you’ll actually use the shortcut, and it will generate the symbols for you. So that is how you can actually create the shortcut and have it save for you this way.

One last word of advice. Test out the shortcut you just made to make sure that it actually works before moving on. One cool tip to get to the System Preferences faster is to hit COMMAND + SPACE to get the Spotlight search where you can type in System Preferences, or even just “Sys”. Hit Enter, and it brings you to this Home section of the System Preferences.

That’s how you create custom shortcuts for Excel on your Mac.

Posted on

0001 Excel Shortcuts: How to Open and Close Spreadsheets

If you’re like most people, you are starting your day off with this inefficient step. It doesn’t have to be this way! In this video, I will show you how to open and close spreadsheets using Excel shortcuts for both PC and Mac. Save time every single day, so you can get back to your life!

Download FREE Hands-On Exercises

Full Video Transcript:

If you’re watching this video, then odds are that you’re doing this one thing at least once every single day inefficiently. Today I’m going to show you how to open and close spreadsheets quickly.

The beauty of these shortcuts is that they’re all very simple and very straightforward. So when you want to actually create a new Excel file, all you really need to do is hit CTRL+N with the keyboard. N stands for new, doesn’t get easier than that. Same concept with CTRL+O for open, CTRL+S for save. Gets a little different with CTRL+W, think of it as closing the workbook or closing the window, which is actually different than quitting the whole application. I’ll show you in a second. So that is what you use ALT+F4 to quit the application, right. So if I hit CTRL+W, it closes that workbook or that window, but if I hit Alt+F4 on the PC, it quits the entire program. That’s the difference.

So what I want you to do is pay attention to that little nuance. And for the Mac, it’s actually going to be COMMAND+Q to quit, which is even more straightforward.

The memory trick here for the PC is think of it as at the altar, the Fantastic Four, those superheroes that we all love, are getting married and the priest is really fed up and says, “I quit.” So at the altar, the Fantastic Four getting married and priest says, “I quit,” that means ALT+F4 is to quit the application. And that’s it.

So for this exercise I want you to actually go ahead and create 5 new workbooks, save them all with silly names like 1 through 5, close them all, open them back up. And again, use only the keyboard shortcuts.

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 I’ll see you next time. And in the meantime, don’t forget to share the Excel love.

Posted on

How A Haunted House Helped My Students Learn Excel Shortcuts

A few weeks ago a friend emailed me a link to Jim Kwik’s mini series on learning faster.

In his first video, Mr. Kwik (yes, that is actually his name) breaks down a super easy and fun method for remembering a list of 10 items.

The key is to place those items into different locations in your mind. You end up creating an entire story, which apparently we are much more capable of remembering than a string of boring facts.

Shocking, right? 🙂

Jim did such an incredible job that I was immediately inspired to create a memory system for learning and remembering Excel keyboard shortcuts.

I’ve already tried my Haunted House Method for learning Excel Shortcuts on a handful of students, and on average they increased their retention by 419%.

Not bad if you ask me.

Here’s the 1st part of what could potentially turn into a 12 part series of memory tricks to learn the top 60 Excel shortcuts.

That is, of course, if there’s enough interest.

Be sure to leave a comment telling me if this was helpful or not!