The best Excel shortcuts for selection

What are the best Excel selection shortcuts? Excel is a very powerful software tool and the most used spreadsheet program in the world by far. Nowadays everyone uses Excel in their daily work. However, many of the most effective Excel shortcuts for making selections are still little known. Here are the best Excel shortcuts in a series of articles.


This selection of 16 Excel shortcuts allows you to select the desired area only with the keyboard, and allows you to work much faster and gain in efficiency and productivity with Excel.

What are the best Excel shortcuts for selection of multiple cells ?

In addition, here are a few examples of selections that these Excel shortcuts allow you to perform:

  • How to select an entire pivot table?
  • How to extend the Excel selection to the right?
  • Which shortcut to select an entire row in a table with Excel?
  • How to return to the beginning of a row in an Excel file?
  • Keystroke combination to select a table of several thousand rows with a few keystrokes?

Cell-by-cell change shortcuts

First of all, this section presents the cell-by-cell selection shortcuts in an Excel sheet.

  1. Firstly, to extend the Excel selection of a cell above : SHIFT + ARROW UP
  2. Expand the Excel selection of a cell below : SHIFT + ARROW DOWN
  3. Extend the Excel selection of a cell to the right : SHIFT + RIGHT ARROW
  4. Finally, to extend the Excel selection of a cell to the left : SHIFT + LEFT ARROW


Selection shortcuts in up to the last cell

To go further, this section presents the shortcuts for selecting up to the last cell, horizontally or vertically.

  1. To expand the Excel selection of a cell to the last cell above : CTRL + SHIFT + ARROW UP
  2. Expand the Excel selection of a cell to the last cell below : CTRL + SHIFT + DOWN ARROW
  3. Extend the Excel selection of a cell to the last cell on the right : CTRL + SHIFT + RIGHT ARROW
  4. Finally, for the Excel selection of a cell to the last cell on the left : CTRL + SHIFT + LEFT ARROW


The selection changes in Excel until the next screen

Thirdly, the Excel selections screen by screen.

  1. Indeed, to expand the Excel selection to the next screen above : SHIFT + PAGE UP
  2. Then, to expand the Excel selection to the next screen down : SHIFT + PAGE DOWN
  3. Expand the Excel selection to the next screen to the right : ALT + SHIFT + PAGE DOWN
  4. Finally, to extend the Excel selection to the next screen to the left : ALT + SHIFT + PAGE UP

Selection changes to the next cell

Finally, the selection changes by considering the first cell of the row, or file, or to activate Excel’s extended selection mode.

  1. In addition, to extend the Excel selection to the first cell in the row : CTRL + SHIFT + LEFT ARROW
  2. Extend the Excel selection to the first cell of the Excel file : CTRL + SHIFT + START
  3. Finally, to extend the Excel selection to the last cell of the Excel file : CTRL + SHIFT + END

BONUS: Activate or deactivate the extended selection mode! To deactivate the extended selection mode, simply press F8 again: simply press F8


In conclusion, we have seen the best Excel data selection shortcuts to answer the common questions that everyone in the office asks to save time.On the other hand, there are other Excel tricks available, such as rotating the rows of an Excel table into columns.

This article describes how to display the day from a date in all letters in an Excel formula.

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