In honor of International Keyboard Shortcut Day, here are three easy to remember shortcuts for formatting text.
Ctrl+B: Makes the selected text bold. Get it? ‘B’ is the first letter of ‘bold’.
Ctrl+I: Makes the selected text italics. Get it? ‘I’ is the first letter of ‘italics’.
Ctrl+U: Makes the selected text underlined. Get it? Of course you do.
I use the first two all the time. I use the third one exactly never. I never find need to underline anything in Excel (or Word).
I’m with you Scott. I use it very rarely, too. In fact, I would have probably forgot about it except that I just used it the other day.
Perhaps my most favorite of all the shortcuts is
Ctrl+Z, for udno, I mean undo. What a funny looking word.While we’re on the topic of selections I have a question that I hope someone here can help with.
Imagine that a range of cells has been selected, whether via keyboard or mouse+CTRL – is there a way to deselect a specific item? E.g. a user has painstakingly selected a number of cells (or rows or columns) and they suddenly realize that they didn’t want one of them. Is there a way to deselect that one item, or are they SOL and have to start the selection process over again?
In my line of work, I find the strike-through to be very useful,
Ctrl+5.@David, you can’t make a comment like that without telling us what that line of work is!
@VvM, if you google “excel deselect cells” you’ll find that there’s no built-in way. The most common answer is to use some code written by Chip Pearson, which I assume works great like everything else he does.
One answer that occurs to me is to turn on the macro recorder before you start selecting. When I do that and select a bunch of overlapping ranges, they are each added to the code separately, like:
Range("B6:C9,C8:E9,E5:F9,F5,F11,E14,D8:G15").SelectIf you make a mistake, stop the macro recorder, clear your selection, delete the offending range from the line of code and run it. In my two minutes of testing it works great :).