Creating Selections

Having survived the DOS era I find myself reluctant to give up keyboarding, and one of my favorite keyboard functions in Excel is the F8 Extend key.

By moving the cell pointer to the starting cell, you can press F8 to enable Extend (indicated on the right of the status bar by the letters EXT). Using the mouse, you can click on the final cell of a contiguous range to extend the selection highlight. All keyboard cursor keys can also be used to extend the selection.

For extremely large ranges you can do the following:

1. Move the cell pointer to the starting cell
2. Press F8 to activate extend
3. Press F5 to activate Go To (Click here to see a related figure.)
4. Enter the ending cell address
5. Press Enter or click OK to extend the selection

For non-contiguous ranges the key combination of Shift+F8 turns on Add. Using the mouse you can click and drag each required block of ranges.

To cancel either Extend or Add press the Esc key or press F8 or Shift+F8 again.