Keyboard or Mouse… Which is more effective?

This is a vital question if you use Excel a lot. Which is more effective to use, the keyboard or the mouse? This can definitely make a difference to your speed in Excel.

Obviously you need to use both at some point for maximum effectiveness, as you can’t point with the keyboard and you can’t type with the mouse (unless you have a custom setup).

I personally find that knowing when to use the keyboard and when to use the mouse can take some explanation and some exploration. Read on to find out more…

In my best dreams I can control Excel with the power of thought, and don’t touch the keyboard or mouse at all. Back in the real world we can’t use mind control, so let’s maximize the physical tools at our disposal!

In this post, we start looking at ways to use the keyboard and mouse in Excel. Any shortcuts I introduce will be most relevant to Excel 2007 and 2010 for Windows, as these are the versions I currently use.

If you use another version of Excel then a search on the internet will reveal different keyboard and mouse shortcuts. To save you the time, we looked around the internet and found 15 great resources for Keyboard shortcuts in Excel which you can check out: 15 Awesome Resources for Excel Shortcuts

There are so many actions and shortcuts you can learn for both the keyboard and mouse. A little explanation is in order, then you can go explore. Let’s take the keyboard first.

Obviously you can use the keyboard to do plain old typing, and you’ve probably found some function key shortcuts such as F2 to edit the active cell, and F4 to repeat the last action.

Have you used the modifier keys “shift”, “control” or “alt” with other keys, and also in combination with each other? If not, take a moment to go explore in Excel.

To get you started, here is a video showing how you can navigate using the Control + arrow keys (ctrl + right arrow, ctrl + down arrow, ctrl + left arrow, ctrl + up arrow).

Have you found the Alt accelerator key combinations, which can potentially turbo-charge your speed doing everyday stuff in Excel? If not, open up Excel and try some out, they may or may not be to your liking.

To get you started, here is a video showing how you can zoom to the current selection (Alt, W, G) and then zoom back out again (Alt, W, J). These Alt combinations are definitely faster if you know how to touch type so you don’t need to take your eyes off the screen to type them in.

The trick is to find commands you use often, then figure out what the Alt key combinations are for those commands and learn them.

Both left clicking and right clicking are quite self-explanatory, if you haven’t tried right clicking then go ahead and see what happens. But the less-frequent “left click then drag”, “right click then drag” and “double-click” offer interesting ways to speed up your work.

Here’s an illustration of left click then drag, where I have selected two rows and then moved them by left-clicking on the dark border and dragging that

Next I’ll show you a right click then drag, where there are formulas in the yellow rows and I have changed these to values. This time I am selecting the yellow cells with the left mouse button, then right-clicking on the dark border, dragging one cell to the right, then dragging one cell to the left and letting go. This brings up a context menu where I select “Copy here as values only”.

Finally here’s an illustration of double-clicking, where I have filled down a formula by double-clicking the fill handle “cross-hair”.

Now that we’ve covered the keyboard and mouse separately, let’s see what happens when we use them together. Some fun things start to become possible!

You can right click on a cell, column or row, and then use the keyboard shortcuts shown by underlined letters on the context menu, as you can see in this example.

Or you can hold down the shift key while left-dragging a selection, which moves and inserts the selection in between existing cells. That will save you some cutting and pasting, and if haven’t tried using the shift key while dragging with the left mouse button you should go try it now – it’s really useful!

Basically the take-away lesson today is that Excel gives you many ways to interact with it. If you haven’t already done so, it’s your turn to try out different shortcuts on the keyboard and mouse.

Remember if you really want to accelerate your Excel then you’ve got to practise these shortcuts until they are second nature. Maybe one day we’ll be able to control Excel with our thoughts, but until we get there I would recommend that you analyze your own work-flow to find out what actions or commands you do the most frequently, and then find and master the relevant keyboard or mouse shortcuts.