Click here for Introduction Click here for Table of Contents Click here for Examples and Special Topics
BarEnd.jpg (765 bytes)

  Selecting Cells
Excel uses a "select, then do" design.  You have to select a cell or a range (a region of the worksheet) before you issue commands on it.   People who are new to the program often forget this, sometimes leading to confusion.

Always remember where your cursor is located before you choose any menu command or click any toolbar button.  When you build a formula, make sure that your cursor is located in the cell where you want the formula result to be before you start building the formula.

Over time, people find it relatively straightforward to think of a worksheet in terms of blocks (ranges) of spreadsheet cells -- some ranges hold captions, some hold data, and some hold the results of formulas.  Get into the habit early and save yourself time.
Learn more
Open Excel and experiment with selecting cells, entering texts and numbers, and otherwise messing about with a blank worksheet that you do not need to save.  Note that the program thinks of cell contents and cell formatting as two different characteristics.

Other tricks:

  • You can select a single cell by left-clicking on it.
  • You can select multiple contiguous cells by left-clicking on the first cell and dragging to the last cell.
  • You can select multiple non-contiguous cells by holding down the CTRL key as you left-click on each cell.  When you do this, the prior cell(s) that you chose remains selected too.  Try it.  This is a useful trick when you want to format a number of non-contiguous cells at the same time.
  • You can select a single cell, then hold down the SHIFT key and select a second cell.   All of the cells in between will also be selected.  Try it.

Once you have selected a block of cells -- a range of cells on the worksheet -- the cursor will remain constrained within that range.  In other words, if you are going to type five rows of captions for an income statement (e.g. revenue, expenses, operating income, taxes, net income), you can select five rows within column A of the worksheet, type each caption, press the ENTER key, and at the end of the fifth row the cursor will bounce back to the first row.  Try it -- select a block of cells on a blank worksheet and press the ENTER key repeatedly.  Watch what happens to the cursor.  Now try pressing SHIFT + ENTER.  Watch what happens to the cursor -- it reverses direction.   If you have selected a range of cells that is more than one column wide and more than one row deep, try using the TAB key and SHIFT + TAB as well.  See how the cursor behaves -- now it tabs across columns instead of moving down rows.  When you have a lot of data to enter in a worksheet, these tricks can save you some time if you know how to use them.