Navigate Word and Excel using keyboard shortcuts

The fastest way of selecting an entire paragraph with the mouse is to click three times on any word in the paragraph.

There’s no single keyboard shortcut to select a paragraph, but it can be done by combining Ctrl and the Up arrow to take the cursor to the beginning of the paragraph and holding down Shift, Ctrl and pressing the Down arrow to select the whole paragraph.

But the keyboard isn’t always king. Take magnification, for example. In Word and Excel, the best way of zooming in or out of a document is by using the mouse scroll wheel.

Used by itself, the scroll wheel simply moves the page up and down, but when combined with the Ctrl key, it zooms in and out in a series of closely spaced steps, rather like the motorised zoom of a digital camera.

Excel differences
Because of the functional differences between a word processor and a spreadsheet, some of Word’s keyboard shortcuts behave differently in Excel. Ctrl and Page Up and Ctrl and Page Down switch not between pages but between multiple worksheets, while Ctrl and G goes directly to a designated cell, rather than a page number.

Home still goes to the beginning of a line, but End doesn’t go to its end – instead, it switches on End mode. In this mode, pressing an arrow key jumps to the last occupied cell in the chosen direction, which is really useful when resuming data entry after a break.

Two of our favourite Excel keyboard shortcuts are completely non-intuitive, but well worth remembering: Ctrl and Spacebar selects the entire column and Shift and Spacebar selects the entire row.

Free shortcut guides
If you’ve been inspired by this short introduction and now want to learn new ways of performing everyday tasks using the keyboard, we’ve put together some printable guides for use with Word and Windows.

Trying to implement them all at the same time will lead to confusion, so we suggest you scan the free guides for the commands that seem most useful and try them out a few at a time. If you use them regularly, they’ll soon become second nature, but don’t get hung up on trying to master them all.

Learning just a handful of the most versatile shortcuts will make a really big difference to how quickly you can work with documents.

Handy commands
Some keyboard commands are common to all well-written Windows programs, and there’s no way that using a mouse and menus can compete with these timesavers:

Ctrl + P (Print)
Ctrl + S (Save)
Ctrl + C (Copy)
Ctrl + V (Paste)
Ctrl + Z (Undo)
Ctrl + Y (Redo)
Esc (Close a dialogue box)

You can download a free PDF that lists the most useful keyboard shortcuts for Word and Windows here.