Navigating Your Excel 2010 Worksheet

Once you entered some data into your worksheet you will now need to know some of the best ways to navigate around the sheet as your data is likely to take up more space than you can see on screen. (Unless you have a very small worksheet, or very large monitor of course.)

Moving With The Mouse and Scroll Bars

Assuming your data stretches off screen, one of the easiest ways to move around your worksheet is by using the mouse – If you need to move the insertion pointer to a new place that you can see on screen, simply point to place where you want to move to and click the left button.

If however, your sheet stretches off-screen, and you want to navigate to something you cant see there are a couple of ways to do it using the mouse

  1. Using the scroll wheel – if your mouse has a wheel, then you can use it to scroll your sheet up and down, and if you have a tilt enabled wheel you may be able to scroll left and right.
  2. Using the scroll bars / arrows – in the screen shot below you will see some pointers to to the scroll bars / arrows. If you want to move your worksheet by large amounts, click, hold and drag the appropriate scroll bar to move, if you just want to move either a row or column at a time, simply click on the appropriate scroll arrow.

Navigate_Excel_2010_1

 

With The Keyboard

As any regular computer user will tell you the the mouse is fine, but for sheer speed you can’t beat using the keyboard, and as with most other programs navigating Excel will be easier if you master the following:

KeystrokeAction
Up ArrowMove Up One Cell
Down ArrowMove Down One Cell
Left ArrowMove Left One Cell
Right ArrowMove Right One Cell
Page UpMove To The Previous Screen
Page DownMove To The Next Screen
HomeMove To The Beginning Of The Current Screen
EndMove To The End Of The Current Screen
[Ctrl]+Up ArrowTo The First Box In The Current Column Containing Data
[Ctrl]+Down ArrowTo The LastBox In The Current Column Containing Data
[Ctrl]+Left ArrowTo The First Box In The Current Row Containing Data
[Ctrl]+Right ArrowTo The Last Box In The Current Row Containing Data
[Ctrl]+Page UpTo The Active Cell In The Previous Worksheet
[Ctrl]+Page DownTo The Active Cell In The Next Worksheet
[Ctrl]+HomeTo The Beginning Of The Sheet
[Ctrl]+EndTo The End Of The Sheet

With The GoTo Command

If you know exactly which cell you want to jump to, and it’s a long way away from the currently active cell then a good option is the GoTo command – Simply hit F5 to bring up the GoTo dialog box as shown below.

Navigate_Excel_2010_2

Then type the name of the cell you want to jump to in the ‘Reference’ line and click ‘OK’ and you will jump straight there – The upper section of the dialog labelled GoTo will display any recently used jumps, so if you do flip between multiple points regularly then it’s possible to click the one you want form that list.