Enter commits a cell and moves down, and Tab commits and moves right. Shift+Enter and Shift+Tab reverse those. Select some cells, type a value and press Ctrl+Enter to put it in every one of them at once. It's a fast way to stamp a label down a column. Alt+Enter puts a line break inside a cell. To edit a cell in place instead of overtyping it, press F2 or double-click. That drops you into the cell with the cursor at the end, which you'll be glad of when you need to make a surgical edit to a long formula.
Ctrl+; (semicolon) stamps today's date as a fixed value, and Ctrl+Shift+: (colon) stamps the current time. These stamps are static, so they won't change tomorrow. The functions =TODAY() and =NOW() are volatile and recompute every time the sheet calculates. Use the keyboard stamps for a permanent "data pulled on" marker and the functions for a live clock.
Confusing the two is how a report's "as of" date silently rolls forward and misleads a reader.
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How does the fill handle continue a series?
Type 100 in a cell and drag its fill handle, the small square at the bottom-right of the selection, downward. By default Excel copies 100 down. Now type 100 in one cell and 125 in the next. Select both and drag. Excel detects the step of 25 and continues the series with 150, 175, 200, 225, …. Two seed values teach it the pattern. It works on numbers and dates. Weekday and month names fill the same way. Drag Jan to get Feb, Mar, …, or drag a date to step through days. For explicit control use Home ▸ Fill ▸ Series, where you set the step value and the stop value yourself.
Ctrl+D fills down from the cell above without dragging, and Ctrl+R fills right from the cell to the left. Then there's the professional's shortcut. Double-click the fill handle and the formula or pattern fills down to match the length of the adjacent column. There's no dragging and no overshoot. It stays correct even at 10,000 rows.
What is Flash Fill and when should you use it?
Flash Fill (Ctrl+E, or Data ▸ Flash Fill) reads patterns. It watches you type and infers a transformation from your examples. Say column A holds full names like Rajesh Kumar and you want first names in column B. Type Rajesh in B2 and start typing Suresh in B3, and Excel offers to fill the whole column with first names. Accept with Enter. From one or two examples, with no formula, it splits, joins, re-cases, inserts characters, pads and reformats. For one-off cleanups it's astonishing: reconstructing a padded SKU, pulling a domain out of an email, reformatting a phone number, stitching City, State from two columns.
It comes with two cautions. Flash Fill writes static values instead of formulas, so it doesn't update if the source changes. Re-run it, or use a formula if the data is dynamic. It also occasionally guesses the wrong pattern from too few examples, so give it a second example and eyeball the result. We use it on the US SKU list in Worked Example 2.