Chapter 2: Entering and Editing Worksheet Data
2
■ (^) Select multiple characters. Press Shift while you use the navigation keys.
■ Select characters while you’re editing a cell. Use the mouse. Just click and drag
the mouse pointer over the characters that you want to select.
■ Delete a character to the left of the insertion point. The Backspace key deletes
the selected text or the character to the left of the insertion point if no characters
are selected.
■ (^) Delete a character to the right of the insertion point. The Delete key also deletes
the selected text. If no text is selected, it deletes the character to the right of the
insertion point.
Learning some handy data-entry techniques
You can simplify the process of entering information into your Excel worksheets and make
your work go quite a bit faster by using a number of useful tricks, which are described in
the following sections.
Automatically moving the selection after entering data
By default, Excel automatically selects the next cell down when you press the Enter key
after entering data into a cell. To change this setting, choose File ➪ Options and click the
Advanced tab (see Figure 2.4). The check box that controls this behavior is labeled After
pressing Enter, move selection. If you enable this option, you can choose the direction in
which the selection moves (down, left, up, or right).
Selecting a range of input cells before entering data
When a range of cells is selected, Excel automatically selects the next cell in the range
when you press Enter, even if you disabled the After pressing Enter, move selection option.
If the selection consists of multiple rows, Excel moves down the column; when it reaches
the end of the selection in the column, it moves to the first selected cell in the next
column.
To skip a cell, just press Enter without entering anything. To go backward, press
Shift+Enter. If you prefer to enter the data by rows rather than by columns, press Tab
rather than Enter. Excel continues to cycle through the selected range until you select a
cell outside the range. Any of the navigation keys, like the arrow keys or the Home key,
will change the selected range. If you want to navigate within the selected range, you have
to stick to Enter and Tab.
Using Ctrl+Enter to place information into multiple cells simultaneously
If you need to enter the same data into multiple cells, Excel offers a handy shortcut. Select
all of the cells that you want to contain the data; enter the value, text, or formula; and
then press Ctrl+Enter. The same information is inserted into each cell in the selection.