Video Review of Short-cuts

There are probably thoushands of short cuts in excel (I don’t really know). Sometimes when I teach a class, I am told by participants that they will not be able to remember any of the short-cut keys I show them one day after the class is finished. My response is that you just need to know what you can do and the rest is like a cookbook. This is why I have created the files and videos below. The first point to understand is that some short-cuts are easy and really help and are worth a tiny investment in practicing. But like a lot of other things in life, you can take things to the extreme and over-use the short-cuts. So I have tried to discuss a few selected few of the short-cuts are really helpful.

Helpful short-cuts include ALT, E,I, S (Everybody Is Stupid, Egyptian Intelligence Service, Elvis Is Sleeping) that works really well with the SHIFT,CNTL,R macro explained in the Generic Macro section below. Other helpful short-cuts include ALT,E,M to move sheets around, ALT,E,L to delete a sheet, ALT E,S to paste special and SHIFT, ALT, right arrow and SHIFT, ALT, left arrow, The best short-cut may by the F11 key to make a graph and the ALT, F1 key to put the graph on the current page. To or delete a row or a column, the SHIFT, SPACE and the SHIFT CNTL keys combined with SHIFT,CNTL, + and SHIFT,CNTL,- can be helpful. All of these short-cuts are directly from excel and not associated with any of the files that I have made (i.e. Generic Macros”). Other useful macros create a new sheet, CNTL, N and format cells, SHIFT, CNTL, 1 to 7. One of the new short-cut keys is good for quickly freezing the panes and then un-freezing — ALT, W, F, F.

The video below walks you through these and other short-cut keys in the context of a credit analysis model and the files listed below are used in the videos. In the file named Project and Corporate Credit Example I have listed some of the short-cuts that I think are really helpful. The Project and Corporate Finance Example also is the file that is associated with the video below.