Excel Shortcut - Freeze Panes + More

Learn Excel From MrExcel, Podcast Episode 2146: How To Figure Out Shortcut Keys.

Alright, so, for these last, what, 20-some episodes, I've been talking about my favorite shortcut keys but these may not be your favorite shortcut keys. So, what's important to you is, what are the things you're doing over and over and over, right, and what's the keyboard shortcut for that, right?

So, the first thing you should do is look in the command and see if the tool tip tells you what the keyboard shortcut is. Like, for example, AUTOSUM. If we come up here to AUTOSUM and hover over SUM, right there, it tells us that the shortcut key is ALT+=, alright?

So that's going to be the fastest way to run that command, but let's say that you had to do VIEW, FREEZE PANES, FREEZE PANES right? See, I hover, hover, hover, hover, hover. There's nothing there that's going to offer freeze panes. Now, if you prefer to use the mouse, by all means, right click, ADD GALLERY TO QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR. I don't like that at all. I would really want to have just FREEZE PANES on the QUICK ACCESS TOOLBAR.

Maybe we customize, but the keyboard shortcut for this, for anything that you want to learn how to do, just press and release ALT, and then you see that there's little key tips on, well, first off, all the quick access toolbar items. Those are awesome. The first 9 are easy to do, you know, so you should have your best ones there, but then I know that I want to go to the VIEW tab.

So, the key tip is W, so, I press W to get to the VIEW tab, and then they add more key tips. So, to open the FREEZE PANES, it's going to be F. So, it's going to be ALT+W, F, and then the top one is FREEZE PANES, so ALT+W, F, F, and if you find that you're constantly using FREEZE PANES over and over and over again, figure out what that string is, alright, and just do 1 a week, just 1 a week. Try and get 1 new one a week, and so ALT+W, F, F, right there, and I was able to freeze panes. Already, that's so much faster than going to click on VIEW, OPEN FREEZE PANES, choose FREEZE PANES, you know, and then move your hand back to the mouse.

So, ALT+W, F, F, and this podcast isn't about that one keyboard shortcut. It’s about how to figure out the keyboard shortcut for anything you find yourself doing frequently. If you ever want to become incredibly fast at Excel, using keyboard shortcuts is the fast, fast...using keyboard shortcuts is the best way to make you really, really fast at Excel.

Thanks for stopping by. We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.