Excel Tips and Tricks Worth Actually Using

Most “Excel tips and tricks” lists are the same forty tips reshuffled, and more than half of them are formulas — which is a different list, covered in the cheat sheet for Excel. This one sticks to the other half: the keyboard shortcuts and menu commands that change how fast you move around a sheet and clean it up, nothing you type into a cell as a function.

Six that save real time

• —Flash Fill (Ctrl+E) — type one example of the result you want in the cell next to your data, press Ctrl+E, and Excel fills the rest of the column by matching the pattern it sees, no formula involved.
• —Freeze Panes (View tab → Freeze Panes) — locks a header row or a label column in place so it stays visible while you scroll hundreds of rows down or across.
• —Format Painter, double-click — one click copies formatting to a single range and switches off; double-clicking the brush keeps it active so you can apply the same formatting to several separate ranges in a row, then press Esc to stop.
• —Paste Special → Values Only (Ctrl+Alt+V, then V) — pastes a formula’s result as a plain number, breaking the link to whatever cells it was reading, which matters when you need a snapshot that will not change if the source does.
• —Ctrl+Arrow — jumps to the last cell before a gap in a row or column instead of scrolling, the fastest way to find where a long list of data actually ends.
• —Go To Special → Blanks (Ctrl+G, then Special) — selects every empty cell in a chosen range at once, which combined with typing a value and pressing Ctrl+Enter fills every one of them in a single step.

None of these touch a formula. Excel advanced functions and a cheat sheet for Excel cover that half of the job — XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, and the rest — once the sheet itself is laid out the way you want it.

A worked example: Flash Fill

Say column A holds full names as “Smith, John” and you need first names alone in column B. Type “John” into B2 by hand, press Enter, click B2 again, then press Ctrl+E. Excel scans column A, infers that the pattern is “everything after the comma and space,” and fills B3 through the bottom of the list with the matching first names — instantly, with no formula sitting in any of those cells.

Flash Fill is pattern-matching against the one example you gave it, not a rule you defined, so a row that breaks the pattern — a name with no comma, or a middle name in the mix — can get filled wrong without any error appearing. If a few rows in the middle look off, type a second correct example next to one of them and press Ctrl+E again; Excel updates its guess to account for both examples at once.

Where AI actually helps, and where it does not

Asking an AI tool to explain which shortcut fits a task you are about to do repeatedly, or to walk through the exact click sequence for a less common one like Go To Special, is a genuinely good use of it — that is a documentation-lookup question, not a question about your data. OpenAI and Anthropic both give the same advice in their own prompting guidance: say exactly what you are starting with and what you want to end up with, and the answer comes back specific rather than generic.

What it cannot do is look at your sheet and confirm a shortcut worked. Describing a Flash Fill result in a chat window and asking whether it looks right gets you a plausible-sounding answer regardless of whether the fill actually matched your data, because the model never saw the sheet — it is responding to your description of it. A widely cited survey of hallucination in large language models covers why that confidence is not evidence of correctness: fluent output and accurate output are not the same property, and a model has no way to tell you apart from someone describing the result wrong.

A shortcut saves a few seconds, every time you use it. A wrong one costs all of those seconds back the moment nobody checks the result once.

Checks before you trust a shortcut

1. 01After Flash Fill runs, read the first three filled cells against the source column by eye before trusting the rest — a pattern that looked consistent at a glance can still break on a row you have not scrolled to yet.
2. 02After Paste Special → Values Only, click the pasted cell and check the formula bar shows a plain number, not a formula — that confirms the link to the source actually broke the way you intended.
3. 03After freezing panes, scroll both directions once and confirm nothing important landed inside the frozen region, where it will now sit on screen permanently whether you want it there or not.
4. 04Before typing a value into a Go To Special → Blanks selection, check the status bar’s cell count against what you expected — it is selecting every blank in the range, including ones you forgot were empty.
5. 05For any shortcut you are about to build a repeated habit around, decide in advance what you would check to notice it silently stopped working on a new sheet — the same monitoring discipline behind NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework, scaled down from a deployed system to one spreadsheet habit.

What to do Monday

Pick one task you currently redo by hand every week — splitting a name column, re-locking a header row after someone else unfroze it, pasting the same formatting onto three ranges one at a time — and replace it with the matching shortcut above. How to search in Excel covers the companion skill of finding the row you need to work on in the first place, and calculating a dollar total in a column is worth reading once the sheet these shortcuts tidy up also needs a number at the bottom.

Knowing which parts of a task are a quick manual fix and which actually need a formula or an AI-drafted one is exactly the kind of judgement behind the wage premium PwC has been tracking — 62% for workers with measurable AI skills, up from 57% the year before. Coursium teaches that judgement directly, in short lessons built around exactly this kind of worked example. Learn more about how the lessons work.