KEY POINTS

 

Microsoft Excel is helpful for many things but Excel shortcut keys can save you incredible amounts of time.  This post explores the Excel F9 shortcut  key.

 

  • Learn how to use the F9 Excel shortcut key to display the concatenated version of the selected range.

  • The F9 Excel shortcut key can be used to create a text string to generate a reporting filter for your business intelligence reporting software.

 

How to Use the Excel F9 Shortcut Key 

(1)  Determine the cell range that you would like to create a concatenated text string for. 

 

(2) Once you've determined which cell range you'd like to select,  in a cell outside of the range you are going to select, type the "=" symbol and select the cell range.  If you've named your cell range, you can use the "=" symbol then the name of the range.  Be sure to stay in the cell after you've selected your range.

 

F9_SHORTCUT_3D

 

(3)  Once input your formula in the cell, you'll then want to hit the F9 key.  This will display in the cell a concatenated text string of all of the values in your range as shown below.

 

F9_IN_CELL

 

 (4) From the formula bar, you can then remove the "=" symbol as well as the parentheses then hit enter from the formula bar.

 

REMOVE_BRACKETS 

 

(5) Now that you've hit enter, you'll notice that the value in your cell is the list of values from your range with each value separated by a semicolon ";".  If  your business intelligence reporting software requires a semicolon to create a filter, this will work perfectly.  You can use the Ctrl + F shortcut key to do a find and replace on the semicolon to replace the value separator to whatever is required by your software (i.e. some software requires a comma "," others require only spaces).

 

The F9 Excel shortcut key can be used to be build a text string for whatever your requirements may be.  This shortcut key can save you hours if you have a large amount of data that you need to create a filter for from your BI software.  

Let me know in the comments what you've used the F9 shorcut key for!