In this screen cast, I'm going to show you all about moving efficiently around the Excel worksheet. If you'd like to work alone. I have this file called Lotsa numbers. It just has lots of numbers. I'm going to show you how we can quickly move around using the keyboard in Excel. So the first thing I'll show you is basic just up down arrows. You can also select things obviously using the mouse, so you can left-click. I've shown this in at least one previous screen cast. So I'm just going to start in the middle, and you can just do left and right arrow keys to go left and right, up and down arrow keys. That's pretty straight forward. But what I wanted to show you are some other things that you can do. So if you're anywhere in a block of cells, this is known as a contiguous block of cells. We also have a couple other contiguous block of cells over here on the right. So if I'm here in cell D7 and I do Control left, then it goes to the left most cell of that contiguous block of cells. If I do Control right, it goes all the way to the right on that row. Same thing over here. If I'm in M5, I go left and right. You see it doesn't go all the way to column a on the left, because it only is working on that contiguous block of cells. I can do Control up and it goes to the top row of that block of cells, Control down and it goes to the very bottom. I can also hold down the Shift key and let me go back to my main block of cells. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and then I'm going to go arrow up, and then to the right. So you can also select multiple cells by holding down the Shift key and then pressing the left and right or down and left arrow keys. So that's how you can select multiple cells. You can combine the Control keys and the Shift keys. So let me start somewhere over here and I'm going to hold down Control Shift down. So what that does is the control aspect of the Control Shift down, takes it all the way to the bottom. But the shift aspect of that combination highlights or selects all of those cells. So that's a block of cells. You can also do Control Shift right from where I am there, to select the entire block to the right of my active cell. I wanted to just mention here that this cell, B5 right now, is known as the active cell, is the one that if you start typing in. So if I start typing in hello, that's known as the active cell, let me just go ahead and press Escape, because I don't want to enter anything into that cell. This highlighted region here, is known as the selection. So I'll get to that a little bit more about working with the selection and changing the active cell of the selection here in a moment. I wanted to show you what happens if you use the arrow keys and you have multiple contiguous blocks of cells. So I'm going to start here in this cell J3. I'm going to hold down the Control key, Control right arrow, that goes to the next cell in that row that has something in it. Now, if I press control right, is going to go to the last cell in that contiguous block of cells in that row. Then I can press it again and it goes to the next block of cells and so on. So you might want to just play around with a couple of these things. Let me start here in L3 and I'm going to do Control down. So it goes to the last one there, and I do Control down again, it goes to the next cell. Control down goes to 13, Control down goes to 23. So basically, goes to the first or last cell in that column or row of a contiguous block of cells. Let me now show you what I meant earlier by a selection. So this is a selection, you can either drag it out, That's a selection. Cell C5 is the active cell. Or you can start with a cell, I can hold down the Shift key, and I go right arrow, down arrow, and so on. So that is known as a selection, if you want to work with changing the active cell of a selection. So right now that uppermost left cell, B4 is the active cell of the selection. You can press the Tab key. So if I press Tab key once, it goes to the right in the same row, Tab key again goes to, goes to the right. I keep doing this and once you get to the end of a row, you press Tab and it goes to the next row. You can also hold down the Shift key and press tab. So Shift tab, that'll actually go backwards in rows. So row wise going backwards, Enter, when you're in a selection like this, Enter goes to the next row down of the same column. So if I press Enter and then it goes to the next column. Once I get to the bottom of a column, you can also do Shift Enter to go up and back. Control period, will take you from corner to corner of a selection. So I'm just pressing Control period. Sometimes you might want to work with this, going back to selecting cells of an entire contiguous block of cells. If you wanted to select this entire selection, this entire block of cells as a selection, A1 through edge 22. If your active cell is a single cell anywhere in that contiguous block of cells, you can always just do Control Shift eight, which is also Control asterisk. So Control Shift eight and that selects the entire block of cells. Another little tidbit of information, that might help you navigate through your Excel worksheets. If you're anywhere on the spreadsheet and you press Control Home, Control Home always goes up to cell A1. You can also use Control Shift home and that selects everything from a current active cell up to cell A1. The last thing I'm going to show you is, how you can select multiple blocks of cells. Again, if I wanted to select this entire block of cells, I could do Control Shift down, since it's a single column or any cell. You can do Control Shift eight or Control asterisk. If I also wanted to select this other block of cells to the right, I can hold down the Control key. You can either click and drag that area, or you can do, you can highlight this, hold down the Control key and then I could do Control Shift, right? Control Shift down. Then if I wanted to add cells there, I could hold down the Control key. Here I'm just going to outline that block of cells. Maybe, I want to copy all those Control C. We go to this other sheet over here, and I'm just going to do a paste special and then paste the values. So it just took those cells that I selected and it just put them on this worksheet has a single contiguous block of cells. This is quite beneficial by the way, for plotting applications. You'll learn how to plot in Excel later on. But oftentimes, if you want to plot two different columns of data, maybe we have our state and maybe I wanted to plot the population. You need to select the states, plus the population data. In order to select multiple but separate blocks of cells, you have to hold down the Control key. Now I can highlight that, I can go up here to insert recommended charts or I'm just going to insert a column chart, and when we enter that. Then this shows the population of the different states. That's it for this screen cast. Thanks for watching.
