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Three ways to control Excel's cursor movement during data entry

Handy tips.

Hi Susan. I often fill out records in a large table and a very useful procedure I use is to use the CTRL+D shortcut key to duplicate a record, and then just make minor changes for the new record.

1. To start I select the entire record which I plan to duplicate.
2. Then using CTRL, I select the empty cells at the end of the table where the new record must be duplicated. (This can be a single row, or multiple rows. The amount of rows selected is the amount of duplicates created)
3. With the original and the empty cells selected, just press CTRL+D to duplicate - and then make the minor changes for a new record(s).

Cheers

PS: TX for all your great articles...keep them coming.

You can also highlihght the group of cells then hold down the control key and hight other cells in different areas as long as those are highlighted you can enter the data and press enter the cursor will proceed to the next hightlighted cell. for example if you highlight cells a1 thru e1 then hold down the control key and hightlight cells a2 thru e2 and proceed to hightlight say a 10 thru e10 then start entering data the cursor will start at a1 and continue to e1 then a2 to e2 then to a10 to e10 if you press the enter key after enteirng your data. This can be done with none continus cells both rows and columns. this a temporary to enter data into a group of cells without changin how the cursor moves as shown above.

If you change the cursor movement to "right" (1st method) and then select the range of rows and columns to update (2nd method), the cursor will move right upon each press of the "Enter" key, until it gets to the far right and then it will move down one row to the left-most cell on that row in the range. I type by touch and so avoid anything that requires taking the hands off the home keys unnecessarily. And that includes picking up the mouse unnecessarily, so I have most of the old hotkeys hardwired and starting to learn the new ones.

For the ???Three Ways to Control Excel Cursor Movement??? I can add a fourth way to move the Excel cursor that has proven to be useful in certain circumstances.
If you are entering multiple lines of information across multiple columns ??? enter the information in the left-most column then use the key to advance to the next column on the right. ???This is important??? ??? As long as you continue to use the key while going to the right, when you???re done entering data for that particular line or row, you can press the Key for the last entry in the row and the cursor will step down to the next row and all the way to the left ??? back to the first column ??? allowing you to begin the next line of information using a minimum of keystrokes.
This might take a little getting used to???. But once you do it, you???ll find it very useful and it offers an economic keystroke alternative for entering data across a spreadsheet.