How to highlight cells in excel with a keystroke.

July 8, 2006 12:10 AM

MS Excel XP: What is the keyboard shortcut to highlight a cell? My searches turn up no answers.
posted by bigmusic to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

When you say highlight a cell, do you mean to select it or to fill it with a color or perhaps something else?

If your cursor is on the cell, it is selected, and therefore options like CTRL B will bold the contents. More than one cell: hold down SHIFT & ARROW KEYS.

My apologies if I've been too dense to understand your question.
posted by b33j at 12:45 AM on July 8, 2006

F8? That highlights a cell.
posted by zabuni at 1:41 AM on July 8, 2006

Best answer: I, like b33j, don't understand what you mean. For me F8, turns on selection extension mode, but you don't need to do that if you are already on the single cell you want selected.

If you actually mean to fill the cell with a color, then I don't think there is a built-in shortcut for that. You can make a macro by selecting Tools > Macro > Record new macro.
posted by grouse at 2:04 AM on July 8, 2006

I think he means pressing a keyboard combination like +A+5 to zip straight to a particular cell w/o mouse or arrow keys (in this case, A5, of course). I'm not sure this is possible.
posted by IronLizard at 8:37 AM on July 8, 2006

Err, there should be (somekey) in front of a+5, but I used angle brackets (oops).
posted by IronLizard at 8:38 AM on July 8, 2006

Response by poster: I just wanted a shortcut to fill a cell with a color. Recorded the macro, it works quite nicely.
posted by bigmusic at 10:46 AM on July 8, 2006

Not exactly a shortcut, but this is what I do to make filling a cell with color easy:

Arrange the primary toolbar so that the "fill cell" button is on the far left side. So, to the left of the new file and save file buttons (I do this with the formatting functions for which I don't have a shortcut macro--just fill cell and indent).

Then to access, hit "alt" to get to the menu bar, then "ctrl-tab" to skip down to the first toolbar. The first button will be hightlight, so if that's the fill cell button, just use the arrow keys to select a color then hit enter. If fill cell is not the first button, you can tab to it.
posted by mullacc at 1:57 PM on July 8, 2006

Ctrl-1 -> Patterns
posted by baylink at 7:42 PM on July 10, 2006