I taught an Excel class yesterday to some of my co-workers. Usually they think all my memorized keyboard shortcuts are just too crazy, but I managed to convince them during the class of the benefit of keyboard shortcuts.
Here are a few things that helped:
- When I told them the keyboard shortcuts, I explained them very slowly, making sure they pressed each key and held it before telling them the next key to press.
- I showed them how quickly things could be done, and those who followed my instructions (highlighting with Control-Shift-Arrow) were able to highlight their data a lot more quickly than those trying to futz around with the mouse.
- Some of the mice in the training room we were in bad shape and were even harder to control than normally functioning mice.
- One of the key combinations I gave them was so complicated it become almost a fun joke, so people memorized it and wrote it down because it seemed convoluted (if you’re curious, the actual key combination is F2, Shift-Home, Control-C, Tab, Control-V).
Well, everyone walked away from that class happy. Ordinarily, though, when I show people keyboard shortcuts, they just shake their heads and reach for the mouse.
Because then the people have to remember the keystrokes.
Well, for some reason, during that workshop, people didn’t seem to mind having to memorize something.
I hear you, though. The mouse is all about not having to memorize anything.
I remember using Excel at work and the biggest boon was keyboard shortcuts to select multiple columns and rows of data.Holding down the left click of a mouse for 100’s of rows and letting go at the wrong moment was irritating beyond belief and produced pain in the wrist and shoulder area ;).
Also, if you used the shortcuts for finding the end of data etc the VB commands for this were revealed to you if you recorded that as a macro. This made importing files and working on data of inconsistent length easier by using macros.
Oh, and while I’m here, thanks for all the good info on partitioning…