Selecting the right cells quickly is 80% of spreadsheet speed, and it's almost entirely a keyboard skill. A mouse is fine for a single cell. For a region it's a liability. Dragging is slow and imprecise, and you can't see where a drag will stop.
How do the jump and select shortcuts work?
The first move is the jump, Ctrl+arrow. Put the cursor anywhere in a block of data and press Ctrl+→. The active cell leaps to the last filled cell before a blank in that direction, which is the right edge of your data region. Ctrl+↓ jumps to the bottom edge, Ctrl+↑ to the top and Ctrl+← to the left. On an empty stretch it flies to the very edge of the sheet, XFD or row 1,048,576. That's how you check how far your data goes in a fifth of a second, and how you land on the bottom of a 40,000-row export without scrolling.
Add Shift and you get the select, Ctrl+Shift+arrow, which selects everything the jump passes over. Stand in the top-left of a column of numbers, press Ctrl+Shift+↓, and the whole column of data is selected, ready to sum, format or copy. Ctrl+Shift+→ then Ctrl+Shift+↓ selects a whole rectangular block corner to corner. Jump and jump-select together are the most valuable motor skill you'll build here.
Drill them until you stop noticing you're doing it.
Advertisement
Which other selection shortcuts are worth knowing?
For the corners, Ctrl+Home returns you to A1 from anywhere, or to the first unfrozen cell if you have frozen panes. Ctrl+End jumps to the bottom-right corner of the used range, where the last row and the last column that have ever held content meet. So Ctrl+End doubles as a gremlin detector. If it lands far below or to the right of your real data, the sheet has "ghost" formatting or deleted content bloating the used range. That inflates file size and scrollbars. Delete the empty rows and columns, then save.
Ctrl+A is select all. Pressed once inside a data region it selects the whole region, and pressed again it takes the entire sheet. Inside a Table the first Ctrl+A selects the Table's data, the second adds the header and the third takes the sheet.
Shift extends and shrinks. Shift+arrow extends the selection one cell at a time, and Shift+click extends it to the clicked cell. Shift+Space selects the whole row and Ctrl+Space the whole column. These combine, so Ctrl+Space then Ctrl+Shift+↓ is one way to grab a column's data below the header.
How do you name a range in the Name Box?
To name a range, select it, click into the Name Box, type a friendly name like Tax_Rate or SalesData, and press Enter. From then on the name stands for the range everywhere. =B7*Tax_Rate reads like English and never breaks when rows shift. Manage names at Formulas ▸ Name Manager (Ctrl+F3). You'll lean hard on named ranges for readability and safety once models get large, so start the habit early.