Excel never ceases to amaze me!
Every time I use it, I find out something new that I didn’t know existed in Excel. I’ve probably only uncovered a quarter of what Excel can possibly do.
* I know of businesses that use excel for their complete internal business system.
* My kids use it for graphing at school.
* I generally use it for formulae or when I need to tabulate something.
Another thing I like about using a computer is shortcut keys. The least number of times I have to move my hand away from the keyboard to use the mouse, the better.
Excel has a mountain of shortcut keys (you can read about them here), but today I’m going to demonstrate how to use just 1 of them. The function key – “F4”
F4 = Repeat the previous action that was just performed
Example – follow these steps.
- Click on any cell.
- Add a “Right” border to that cell
- Click on a different cell
- Press F4
The new cell will now also have a “Right” border on it.
Continue on:
- Highlight a few more cells as a block.
- Press F4
These new cells will also have a right border on them as you were repeating the last action performed.
In the video below, I quickly show you how to use the F4 function key to delete empty rows in a spreadsheet. Often when manipulating data, you cut and paste rows here and there and end up with empty rows all over the place. Using the F4 shortcut key, allows me to delete these extra rows quickly, instead of using “Right click / Delete” action each time.
Want to learn about more excel shortcuts, visit the Automate Excel – Excel Shortcuts page. Here you can learn shortcuts and test your knowledge.
Tell us your favourite shortcut key by commenting below.
Enjoy!
