Excel’s Ribbon is great for finding everything you might ever want to do in a spreadsheet, particularly things you don’t do frequently, like managing and querying data connections or automatically grabbing geographic statistics from the internet and inserting them into cells.

But if you’re looking to do things fast, you’ll find keyboard shortcuts far more useful. Why bother to lift your hands from the keyboard if you want to open or close a file, apply formatting to cells, navigate through workbooks, undo and redo actions, calculate all worksheets in all open workbooks, and more? With keyboard shortcuts you won’t have to.

There are keyboard shortcuts to accomplish a vast array of tasks in the Excel desktop client, in both the Windows and Mac versions. (Fewer shortcuts are available for the Mac, but you can create your own custom keyboard shortcuts if you like.)

We’ve listed the shortcuts we’ve found the most useful below. Most work whether you’re using a subscription (Microsoft 365/Office 365) or non-subscription version of Excel. For even more shortcuts, see Microsoft’s Office site.

Note: On Macs, the ⌘ key is the same as the Command or Cmd key.

Useful Excel keyboard shortcuts

Looking for more help with Excel for Windows? If you have an Office subscription, see “Excel for Office 365/Microsoft 365 cheat sheet.” If you have a non-subscription version of Office, see “Excel 2016 and 2019 cheat sheet.” We’ve also got cheat sheets for an array of other Microsoft products, including older versions of Office.