Excel Tricks
You can do a lot in Excel with the simple techniques that follow (assuming you're using a Mac). If you have little to no experience with the program, you should be able to start at the beginning and comfortably work your way through the whole wiki. If you're trying to figure out how to do something in particular, click one of these links to jump straight to a topic.
- How Excel is organized
- Entering data by typing
- Selecting cells with your mouse
- Selecting cells with your keyboard
- Overwriting cells
- Going inside a cell
An Excel spreadsheet is organized in a grid of cells. The grid has rows and columns. The rows are numbered, the columns lettered.
Each cell can be identified by its row number and column letter. For example, the cell inside the blue box below is B2.
Click on cell B2. You'll see the blue box appear around it, indicating it is selected. Type the number 1, then hit RETURN. The number 1 will be entered into cell B2, and then cell B3 will be selected. Then you can type 2 into cell B3, and so on.
Click on a cell to select it. Click and drag your cursor across a range of cells to select them all. Or click on one cell, then hold down the SHIFT key and click on another cell to select both of those cells and all of the cells in between.
This is what it looks like when multiple cells are selected:
Once you select a cell with your mouse, you can navigate to another cell with the arrow keys. If you hold down SHIFT while doing this, you'll select all of the cells in your path.
If you select a cell that already contains data and you start typing, the data that was there will be erased, and the new data that you've entered will be stored in the cell.
If you double click on a cell, it will take you inside the cell. You will see a blinking cursor. You can move that cursor around with the arrow keys or with your mouse and edit the cell's contents, just as if you were working in a word processor or writing an email. For example, you can double click on the 1 in cell B2 and add a 2 to the very beginning of the cell's contents. Instead of overwriting the 1 with a 2, the value in the cell becomes 21.
Excel is pretty good at recognizing patterns. Type a 1 into cell B2 and a 2 into cell B3. Then select both cells. Hover over the lower right-hand corner of cell B2. You will see your cursor turn from 
If you click on the strange looking thing in the lower right-hand corner (
By default, Excel will Fill Series, which in this case means the numbers 1 — 8. But if you choose instead to Copy Cells, it will repeat the numbers 1 and 2:
The other two options — Fill Formatting Only and Fill Without Formatting — have to do with how cells are formatted, which we'll get to later.
Deleting in Excel is a little counterintuitive. If you select a cell and hit DELETE, then it will erase the contents and take you inside the cell. If you select multiple cells and hit DELETE, it will only erase the contents of the first cell and take you inside that cell.
If, instead you hold down the FN key (in the bottom-right corner of the keyboard) and then hit DELETE, it will erase the contents of all the cells that you have selected and take you inside of none of them. This is usually what you want.
You can copy and paste a cell or a selection of cells using COMMAND+c, COMMAND+v or cut and paste using COMMAND+x, COMMAND+v. You can also select a group of cells and hover your cursor over one of the edges until you get a hand icon (
You can navigate from one cell to another using the arrow keys. If you hold down