Home >  Exploring Excel  > 

An Excel 97-2007 Tutorial:

Excel Shortcut Keys Offer
Quick Access to Dialogs

Shortcut keys offer significant benefits to Excel users. Here, we
show all the shortcut keys we know of that launch Excel dialogs.

by Charley Kyd
April, 2007

Knowing Excel shortcuts will be more important in the future than in the past. And it's all because of Excel 2007.

Whether you upgrade to Excel 2007, or wait until a later version, you'll eventually need to learn Excel's new user interface. Get used to this idea. There's no escape.

Because different companies and departments will upgrade Excel at different times, you'll probably need to use both versions equally well for a long time. Keep in mind that many companies still use Excel 97.

You can simplify this transition by using keystrokes that work the same in both versions of Excel. Excel shortcut keys offer this benefit. In fact, with very few exceptions, all versions of Excel use the same shortcut key combinations.

Excel 2007 also recognizes the first few keystrokes of old-Excel's ALT key commands. So if you know, for example, that ALT+EIS launches the Series dialog, you can continue to use this command in Excel 2007.

Below, we present all shortcut key combinations we know of that launch Excel dialog boxes. If you know of any other shortcuts that launch dialogs, please contact Charley Kyd with this information.

Notice in these tables that you can use two different key combinations to launch most File and Edit dialog boxes. The reason for these duplicates seems to have been lost over the years, but it might have something to do with compatibility with Excel for Apple computers. Whatever the reason, the duplicates allow you to choose a command that you can remember most easily.

In the future, we'll add other tables with shortcuts for other features in all versions of Excel.

File Menu Dialogs

Edit Menu Dialogs

Insert Menu Dialogs

Format Menu Dialogs

Tools Menu Dialogs

Data Menu Dialogs