Top 5 Google Sheets shortcuts

Your work in Google Sheets will go faster if you have a few go-to tricks up your sleeve — especially when you’re working with text instead of numbers.

Lots more folks are using Google Sheets these days to edit things. In fact, we use it on the Daily Tech News Show to make our rundowns — and we’ve taken advantage of some tricks to make that faster over the years.

Some of these tips are the same in other programs, like Excel, and I’m sure many of you know several of them. But you may not know all of them. Especially if you use Sheets for text and not just numbers.

So here are my Top 5 Google Sheets Shortcuts.

1. Make a line break in a cell. If you’re writing a piece of text and press Enter, it just saves it in the cell. If you want to make a line break, hold the Alt key while pressing Enter. On a Mac, hold down the Control key while pressing Return.
2. Cut and paste with or without formatting. If you highlight a cell and paste in text, it will preserve the formatting from where it was copied. If you don’t want this to happen, click into the cell first to edit, then paste the text. Now, just hit Enter to save the text, which will inherit the formatting of the cell it’s being pasted into.
3. Freezing a row is a good way to make data scannable. You can freeze the row that has the labels of columns, for instance. Then, as you scroll through the data, the label row stays at the top so it’s easy to see which columns are which. In Google Sheets, when you’re in a cell for the row (or column) you want to freeze, choose View, then Freeze and the number of rows or columns you want to freeze.
4. Move rows or columns. If you want to easily move a row from one place to another you can drag it with the mouse. Click into the cell of the row number or column number itself, then let go of the click. Then click again and hold the click down. Now you can move the mouse and a cursor will show up. Put the cursor where you want the row or column to move to and let go of the mouse button.
5. Add more than one link to a cell. When you paste a link into a cell, it will automatically become clickable. Pasting another link will usually just paste over the previous one. If you want more than one link in the cell, click into the cell to edit it. Use the Alt-Enter trick to make a new line, then paste the link and press Enter. The link may not be clickable, so go back into the cell to edit it, place your cursor at the end of the unlinked URL and then press Enter. It should now be clickable.

Granted, these are more useful for wordy things than number things, but I think that can still prove useful to a lot of you. Hope they help.