As humans, we are always looking for smarter, better and quicker ways of doing things – especially the repetitive and often annoying day to day tasks.  There are days where we quite literally wish we had a monkey by our sides to perform these tasks, allowing us to spend our time doing things that are of actual value.  Thankfully Excel offers tab shortcuts that help us easily navigate between workbooks, change the name of workbooks at the drop of a hat and enter formulas, formatting and other Excel goodies onto multiple sheets all at the same time – can you believe it!  In this post we are going to look at 3 smart and simple tab shortcuts to make our lives easier and really, just make our day way better.

 

Smart And Simple Tab Shortcut # 1: Lightning Fast Tab Navigation

 

This one may be well known within the Excel community but it is definitely one of my favorites.  This is simple yet effective.  If you would like to move from left to right between your worksheets/tabs, use CTRL + PageDown.  If you’re looking to do the opposite, that is to go from the right to the left, use CTRL + PageUp.  Bammmm, simple as that.

 

Tab_Navigate

 

Smart And Simple Tab Shortcut # 2: Drop the Mouse and Change the Tab Name Without Leaving Your Keyboard

 

This one is a new to me shortcut but a gem nonetheless.  If you are already an avid keyboard user but you don’t know this one, you’ll thank me later.  All we are going to do here is type ALT, H, O, R.  This will bring us directly into type mode for the tab of the current sheet that we are working on.  To me having to double click, or right click and rename the tab is just a nuisance.

###UPDATE### This shortcut is Excel Language Version Specific.  This one works fine in the English version of Excel 2010/2013.  The path nonetheless is Home Tab on Ribbon (H) ⇒ Format (O) ⇒ Rename (R).  Thank you to everyone who piped in on this one.

 

Udpate_tab_No_Mouse

 

Smart And Simple Tab Shortcut # 3: Entering Data Into Multiple Tabs/Worksheets At Once

 

This shortcut is incredible.  All you need to do is use shift or Ctrl + Left Click and select all of the tabs/worksheets that you want to enter your data into.  Once you’ve done this, you can enter data, formatting and formulas into any of the worksheets that you’ve selected and everything will be copied over exactly the same way across multiple sheets.  This one is a beauty for repetitive tasks and data entry and should make your life much easier.  This can save you tons of time especially if you have very similar data or formulas that are required across multiple tabs.  Unfortunately, you can’t add objects when in multi-select sheet mode (I think I may have just made that phrase up).

 

Multiple_tabs_At_Once

 

Summary

 

The best part about this post is that it was quick, painless and hopefully not boring.  Sometimes it only takes a minute to learn something new (and hopefully it is something new to you).  Let’s do a quick breakdown of what we learned.

 

1 » CTRL + PageUp or PageDown – Navigate between worksheets/tabs

 

2 » ALT, H, O, R – Update tab name without reaching for your mouse

 

3» CTRL or SHIFT + Left Click All Tabs – After tabs are selected, enter your data int any worksheet and it will be copied across all of them.

 

And that is all.  Simple and to the point.  If you are feeling ambitious and would like to checkout some other shortcuts, have a look at the other resources section below.  Be sure to leave a comment with your favorite Excel shortcut. I know you Excel junkies are passionate about your shortcuts!