Be More Productive in Excel With the F5 Key
2 minute read
To be more productive in Excel, all you need is one key: the F5 key. It allows you to move much more quickly through your workbook, and also efficiently select very specific types of data in your spreadsheet. Here’s an overview of how to use it.
Navigate to any location in your spreadsheet
Press F5, and enter in any cell that you’d like to move to. You’ll be taken directly to your cell.
Define and select specific types of data
When you click the “Special” button in the left-hand corner of the reference box that appears when you hit F5, you can define and select specific types of data using the buttons in this window.
So, for example, imagine that you have found some data on a website that you want to copy and paste into an Excel spreadsheet. Sometimes when you do this, you end up getting some extra data or images that you don’t need for your project. Using the F5 key and the “Go to Special” menu, you can select objects, which will select all the objects in your spreadsheet. You can just hit delete, and they will vanish, leaving you with the data that you need.
Another great use of this is to find empty cells if a spreadsheet should not have any missing entries. You can use the same menu, search for Blanks, and you will be able to see everywhere you have missing data in a spreadsheet.
Replace all selected cells with a single value
The “Go To Special” command pairs very well with another keyboard shortcut: CTRL + Enter. This allows you to replace all selected cells with a single value. So ifyou realize that all blank cells were left blank because they needed a number from a single source entered into all of them, you can select all the blank cells using “Go To Special”, then type your value, hit CTRL + Enter, and it will populate to all the cells at the same time.
If you’re interested in accessing the menu another way, you can always click on the Find & Select button at the top of your screen, selecting Go To or Go To Special, and then you can pull up the same box using CTRL+G.
