One should not take shortcuts in life – that is what one learns. But, when it comes to MS Excel, I can assure you, that learning some really productive keyboard shot cuts can be really useful.

Sometime back I had written distributed an eBook on Essential shortcuts for MS Excel which was appreciated by everyone.

Adding to that list, I am listing down a few more essential, not-so-well-known shortcuts.

Here is the list:

• Hide and un-hide a column: In case one wants to hide a column, the usual steps of command would be: Select column, right click on the column header and then click ‘hide’. Instead, one can simply use this keyboard shortcut – select the cells which are in the columns which are to be hidden and press – CTRL+0 (the ‘control’ key and the ‘zero’ button on the numeric keys laid below the functions keys). One can un-hide the columns by selecting the hidden range and then pressing SHIFT button together with the above combination.Summary:
  To hide – CTRL+0
  To unhide – SHIFT+CTRL+0
• Hide and un-hide a row: Similar to hide-unhide the column, one can use keyboard shortcut keys to hide and unhide rows. For this, the key combinations are: To hide – CTRL+9; and to unhide the hidden row – SHIFT+CTRL+9
  
• Copy down: This is one of the actions, that is generally not widely used, but trust me. One can save a lot of time which requires lot of copying and pasting, specially while making big spreadsheets with lots of repeating functions / data. The key combinations CTRL+D copies down the data from the cell immediately above. A point of caution – please note that the keys copies data from the cell immediately above, that means – for example, if cells A3:A5 are hidden, with cells A2 and A6 visible as immediate cells, pressing CTRL+D at cell A6 would not copy data from cell A2. It will still copy data from the cell which is actually preceding it, i.e. cell A5
• Copy to right: Another key combination similar to CTRL+D is CTRL+R. This key combination copies the data to cell on the right. So, in case you want to copy some from the cell immediately on left, you can press CTRL+R at the destination cell. The caution I mentioned in the above case, also applies to this combination

See the below video about how to use CTRL+D to copy down the data:

For the last 2 key combinations, there is another point one should keep in mind before being able to use correctly. In case you want to copy down (or copy right) some data to only a single cell, then the use of these keys is quite straight forward. If I want to copy some data (for example, from cell A1) to multiple cells below it (lets say – from cell A2 to cell A5).

In this case, I will have to select range – A1:A5. Note that when copying down (or copying to right), one has to select the source cell also.