what's up everyone it's kenji here and in this video i thought i'd share how to become faster on
excel using the quick access toolbar and you can download the file i'll be working with down in the
description so let's get into it and you might be wondering what's wrong with using regular keyboard
shortcuts well sometimes they're hard to reach and they require you to memorize a lot of keystrokes
that's when the quick access toolbar comes handy for example let's say we work on a business
selling apple products and each week we get a data set like this one from the warehouse team where
we have the revenue breakdown per week over here and so we have the total revenue then we have the
quantity sold as well as the average sale price for each product and our goal is basically to
reformat this to look like this one over here such that we can send it to the senior management team
later on for this we might be tempted to just use the regular keyboard shortcuts so let's go ahead
and do that so over here go to control page down on the top part we're going to need it in dark
blue so go to alt hh from there we're going to select the dark blue color over here then alt hfc
that's going to be for the font color change that to white then we can autofit this column width for
column b just make it wider basically so go to control space and then alt h o i we also want
to remove all of these grid lines as you can see we don't have them over here so go to alt w v g
for that as you can probably start to tell that's quite a lot of different key strokes that you need
to memorize and sometimes it takes four steps just to make one action so if you're feeling a bit lazy
about this and you're not bothered to memorize all of these different keystrokes that's when the
quick access toolbar can come handy by default you should be able to find the quick access toolbar
right over here on the top hand side of your excel file that being said yours might look
slightly different to mine as mine's already personalized and yours is probably not quite yet
now to quickly show you what it does go to control page down over here to this unformatted sheet
and if you recall firstly we had to autofit the column width over here so for that before we have
to do the alt hoi whilst now we can just do the old five that's gonna do the same thing for us
in two strokes instead of four similarly we have to remove all of these grid lines over here if
you recall for that we had to do alt w v g whilst now we can just do the alt 8 and we get the same
feature done in half the amount of time right now that's just a few quick examples of what the
quick access toolbar can do for you but there's dozens of different features in there which we'll
get into now for this go to alt ft which is just file options from there we want to go to the quick
access toolbar and over here on the left hand side you're gonna have all of the different things that
you can put into the quick access toolbar while on the right are currently the things that you have
in there and probably if you haven't touched this before you're just gonna have options like save
or undo things like that generally speaking you don't really want the ones that are very easy
so for instance for saving it's just ctrl s for undoing it's just ctrl z so these are
really simple features that don't really make much sense to have in there because that would
basically take the amount same amount of time to just press ctrl s as it would to access it from
the quick access toolbar so instead what you want to put in here are things that are a bit harder to
find and usually require quite a lot of different keystrokes also you want them to be features that
you use fairly often there's no point having the most obscure formula in there under quick access
right feel free to copy what i currently have if you feel like those are going to be useful to
you so here i've got two different pacing formats then i've got the shortcut for borders for merging
and centering for column width for the fill and the font color grid lines and lastly the camera
which we'll talk about later if you're unable to find the ones over here under the default tab you
can go ahead and go under each of the different tabs that you have on excel typically say under
the home tab for for example and look for the one that you want from there then you just want to
press the add button to import it over here and then hit ok there is another perhaps a bit more
convenient way of inputting things into the quick access toolbar so for example let's say i like
this wrap text feature and i use it a lot i can just go to right click and from there i can go to
add to quick access toolbar which is probably an easier way for you to find what you use most often
now that we understand what the quick access toolbar is and how to personalize it
let's go ahead and work on this data set over here to try to make it look like this one
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code kenji felix all right back to the video now that we've set up the quick access toolbar let's
go ahead and use it to activate it you press the alt key and here you'll start to find all
of the different shortcuts that are going to be available press the escape key to get out of that
and the idea is to essentially make it look like this formatted sheet over here so first things
first let's remove the grid lines for that we can just press the alt 8 then we're gonna autofit this
column width so go to control space and then press the alt 5 key that's going to autofill it for us
then let's select this area over here so shift down shift right arrow and we want to press the
alt 6 and we're going to select the white white sorry the blue fill over here then the font color
we want to make that one white so go to alt 7 and from there we're going to select the white one
ctrl b is going to bold in it for us then just below the revenue one here we want it in light
blue so go to alt 6 and we'll select the light blue it's going to be this top one over here
ctrl b to bold it as well then just over here towards the bottom side on this area here so go
ahead and press the ctrl b to bolden then we're going to put a top border so for that go to
alt 3 and from there you'll press the p key which is going to be the top border for us
then let's reformat these these figures here so they look a bit a bit better go to control 1 key
from there you're going to want to go under the number so go ahead and click that
we don't want any decimals they're not really necessary use the comma separator and let's select
this third one over here press ok then we want to merge and center this top part over here so the
title for that we can just press the alt f4 that's going to do it for us now that we're happy with
the first table format we can just go ahead and copy that to the across the other tables as well
so shift right arrow shift down shift down arrow there ctrl c and from there if you just paste it
normally by pressing ctrl v you're actually going to wipe out all of the numbers that were there
before and just copy the same ones which is not quite what we want instead we just want to paste
the format so for that press ctrl z first and you can either do the typical shortcut here is the alt
h which is quite a tedious process so press control z the other one you can do is to control
alt v and from there you would just paste the formats over here press the escape key to get
out of that but using the quick access toolbar all we got to do is go to alt 2 and we'll get the
same thing done in just two steps same thing down over here so let's go ahead and select the area
and then go to alt 2 control up to go all the way to the top and as you can see now it's looking
pretty similar to the other one now this whole process maybe took about half the keystrokes
that it would have if we just use the traditional shortcuts that's just doing it once if you have to
do this every week it can essentially save you hours and hours of time and if you're wondering
what this camera icon over here that i have under quick access toolbar does it's not to take selfies
on excel but it's actually to screenshot so let's say we want this area over here
you can we can go ahead and select it and then we're just going to press the alt 9 key from there
let's say we want to paste it over here now as you can see it's a screenshot and you're probably
wondering what's the difference between this and any other screenshot using any software and the
difference is that with this one it's dynamic so for example let's say i change this figure to a5
and you can see that the table over here has actually changed even though it's behaving
exactly like an image so that's what's nice about it that it's fully dynamic
overall you can change the location of the quick access toolbar up over here
and then you can go to show below the ribbon which is going to be down over here in this area if
that's a bit better for you for me i find it a bit annoying as it occupies a bit of the space here
so just bring it back up by going to show above the ribbon as you get more familiar with the
quick access toolbar feel free to personalize it in a way that you have the features that
you use more regularly up there on top for more on excel you can check out this link over here
or you can also look at this video over here on excel formulas or this other video over here on
powerpoint shortcuts which are also somewhat similar to the excel ones that's all for this
video hit that like hit that subscribe if you liked it and i'll catch you in the next one