Getting Around in excel 2010

In any event, you’ll need to know about the ways in which you can transport the cell pointer to the various cells across the  worksheet.

Perhaps the simplest means for doing so—and you may well be able to figure out some of these techniques by yourself—is to click your mouse on any cell you wish. But if you need to click a distant cell—say, LA345—you need to get there first, and you’ll find  yourself a long way from that locale when you first get into Excel and find yourself in cell A1.

One way to traverse all that space is  to click any of the four horizontal or vertical scroll buttons lining the far and lower-right sides of the workbook, as in Figure 2–4:
GETTING STARTED AND GETTING AROUND THE WORKSHEET


Figure 2–4. The four scroll buttons
Click one of these and the worksheet slides one row up or down or one column to the left or right in the indicated direction. And if you click a scroll button and then continue to hold the left mouse button down,  the worksheet skitters rapidly in the chosen direction, until you release the mouse. You can also click either of the two scroll bars that sit between the two pairs of scroll buttons shown in Figure 2–5:


Figure 2–5. The scroll bars.
Click either of these and keep the mouse button down. Then pull, or drag, the scroll bar across or down, depending on which  bar you’ve selected; the worksheet speeds in the direction you’ve chosen— but only as far as you’ve already travelled. That is, if you’re currently in column X, for example, you can only scroll horizontally between that column and column A. Note in  addition that when you drag a scroll bar, Excel displays an accompanying caption, one which notifies you which row or column is going to end up in the leftmost column or the uppermost row onscreen once you release the mouse button. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

But remember this: neither scroll option—neither the buttons nor the bars—will actually take you into a new cell. To illustrate  the point: suppose I click cell C5 and then ride my scroll bar to say, column AH. This is what you’ll see, in Figure 2—6:

Figure 2–6. Now you see it, now you don’t: Cell C 5 remains selected, even though you’ve scrolled quite a way beyond it.

You’ve made it to column AH, but look at the name box, the field that always records the current cell pointer location. You’re  still “in” C5, even though you can’t even see that cell onscreen right now. And, as a matter of fact, if you begin to type now, that data will be installed in…cell C5 (and note that row heading number 5 is colored, reminding you that this row continues to be  occupied by the cell pointer).

The larger point, then, is that scrolling will only enable you to view new areas of the worksheet.

If you want to actually move into cell AH1, for example, you’ll still have to click it.

As you may have gathered, then, there is a kind of hit-or-miss quality to mouse moves. Clicking or dragging or scrolling in the  direction you want to go, in the hope of landing precisely in the cell you’re seeking, can be something of a challenge —particularly if you want to travel a long way across the worksheet. If I need to deposit the cell pointer in cell AB367, for  example, and I’m starting cell from D8, I may have to do quite a bit of clicking and dragging until I end up at that address—if I  rely on my mouse.

Key Points
But Excel supplies us with a range of keyboard navigational maneuvers that also allow us to home in on the cell we want; and  again, some of these are rather self-evident. First, pressing the Enter key bumps the cell pointer down one row—though keep  in mind it is possible to change the direction an Enter press takes. By clicking the File  Advanced  After Pressing Enter command, you can actually redirect the Enter press to head left, right, or even up, instead of down.

And if you uncheck the  After Pressing Enter box, pressing Enter won’t move the cell pointer at all, leaving it in the cell in  hich  you just typed. Press any of the four arrow keys and you move in the appropriate directions (and thus the Down arrow and Enter keys are equivalent here). Press Tab and you head one column to the right. Enter the Shift-Tab combination and you set  out in the opposite direction—one column left; and so these Tab variations thus emulate the Right and Left arrow keys,  and Shift-Enter lifts you one row up.

To encompass broader stretches of the worksheet in one fell swoop, press the Page Up or Page Down keys. These zoom you up, or down, one screen’s worth of rows; just remember that, because you can modulate the heights of rows (something we haven’t learned yet) the number of rows you’ll actually span in that screen’s worth with will vary.

A far more obscure set of keystroke pairings—Alt-Page Down and Alt-Page Up—take you one screen’s worth of columns right  or left, respectively, though because you can also widen or narrow columns the number of columns across which you’ll travel will vary, too.

Note in addition that if you hold down any of the above navigational keys instead of merely pressing them, the cell pointer will  careen rapidly in the direction you’ve chosen. Thus hold down Page Down, for example, and you’ll streak down the worksheet  at breakneck velocity.

Now here are two more slightly different but surprisingly useful keyboard navigators. Press Ctrl- Home and Excel will always  deliver you back to cell A1, irrespective of your current location. What’svaluable about Ctrl-Home? Well, if you find yourself the spreadsheet equivalent of a million miles (or cells) away from  home, Ctrl-Home immediately rushes you back to the worksheet’s point of inception— that is, cell A1.

And for a kind of flip side to Ctrl-Home, there’s Ctrl-End, a slightly trickier move. Tapping Ctrl-End ferries you to the last cell in the worksheet containing data, that is, the lower-rightmost cell in which any kind of data at all is currently stored. Thus, if you’ve typed 476 in cell XY567912 and nothing else beyond that spot, Ctrl-End will take you exactly there. There’s only one problem with Ctrl-End: if you delete the 476 from cell XY567912 and then press Ctrl-End, you’ll still be sent back to that cell –  even though it’s currently empty. In order to let Excel know where to find the last data-bearing cell on the worksheet now—wherever it may happen to be—you need to save the worksheet first.

Then press Ctrl-End, and you’ll find yourself face-to-screen with the “new” last cell in the worksheet.

And the name box we introduced at the chapter’s outset also plays a navigational role. Click the box and then type any cell  reference, e.g., D435 (by the way—cell references aren’t case sensitive; you could type d435, as well), as in Figure 2–7:

Figure 2–7.
Using the Name Box to navigate to a cell address Then press the Enter key, and Voila! Excel surges directly into D435. This  method, then, provides a high-speed route to precisely the cell you want, no matter how far away; and unlike scrolling, it  places you right smack-dab into the cell.

And for a similar but not identical means for pinpointing a particular cell, press the F5 key and this Go To dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 2–8:

Figure 2–8.
The Go To dialog box Type a cell in the Reference field, press Enter, and again the cell pointer rockets to just that address.

And if you think Go To is a virtual clone of Name Box with nothing new to offer, that isn’t quite true.

If you use Go To repeatedly in the course of your current spreadsheet session, it compiles a list of all the destinations you’ve previously visited with that command, as shown in Figure 2–9:

Figure 2–9.
Getting to a cell via Go To Click any of the addresses recorded and click OK, and you’ll be returned to that address (those  dollar signs will be explained in a later chapter). (Go To also does a number of other more exotic things, too, such as flagging  all the worksheet’s cells with formulas in them, if you need to know that sort of thing.) Here’s a table summary of these options  we’ve described (the list is not exhaustive, by the way, but will surely do for now) .