30 Google Sheets Shortcuts That Can Have a Huge Effect on Your Workflow

If you use Google Sheets often, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to search for specific tools or settings. Besides being annoying, having to constantly search through toolbars and context menus slows down progress and wastes valuable time. Google Sheets actually has dozens of built-in shortcuts, from the most well-known to the most obscure. Master them and your hands will rarely have to leave the keyboard, making you faster, more efficient and cooler than everyone else in the office.

Naturally, some shortcuts are more useful than others. For example, shortcuts requiring multiple sequential key presses were intentionally left out, as they are harder to remember and primarily used for navigating menus anyway. You’ll notice that copy, paste, and undo aren’t mentioned either: the list below has been carefully curated, with shortcuts only included if they’re likely to save you time or make a noticeable difference to your workflow. And they are not already very well known.

Did you know that you lose around 0.4 seconds every time you switch from mouse to keyboard? While it’s not really a huge waste of time, using five shortcuts per team will save you about eight minutes per year. To be honest, it’s still faster to use the mouse in certain circumstances.

Clicking on an individual cell will always be faster than selecting it with the keyboard, unless it is immediately adjacent to the already selected cell or the desired cell is on the edge of the worksheet. That said, the following shortcuts should help reduce mouse usage over time:

Unlike Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets only offers a few tools to automatically clean your data. It does, however, come with a variety of shortcuts designed to help you get your data into a usable format as quickly as possible. Better yet, accessing some of these options normally requires navigating through multiple menus. In other words, here are some of the most effective shortcuts to find out if your goal is to save time.

More importantly, these shortcuts solve problems that everyone has probably encountered at least once. Is there anything worse than pasting something into Google Sheets and having it appear in a different font than everything else? The spreadsheet that decides something is a date when it clearly isn’t could be a close runner-up. In any case, the shortcuts below can solve both of these problems in just two or three keystrokes.

Two of the best features of Google Sheets are its version control and real-time collaboration capability. If your job requires you to use a shared spreadsheet, you probably already know that to view recent changes and leave comments, you usually need to use the mouse. There is an easier way and you can also use the same shortcuts in Google Docs.

Do you often need to enter the current time or date? Even without accounting for the time it takes to check the current time and date, these tasks require between five and ten key presses. There is also a way to display the formulas governing the values ​​of each cell, rather than the resulting calculations. It may not be the most interesting set of shortcuts, but their value outweighs the cost of time spent memorizing them, especially for experienced users.

The shortcuts below may not be as useful as some mentioned above, but they’re still worth remembering. There are many situations where you may need to quickly highlight an entire row or column, for example.

Without getting too meta, CTRL + / is extremely useful because it displays a searchable list of all supported shortcuts. The Tool Finder is also fantastic because it allows users to search for toolbar options without needing the mouse. The only exception is inserting an image — this option is not available through the tool finder and must still be done the old-fashioned way.

Unfortunately, some of Google Workspace’s most useful features (such as direct file comparison) are exclusive to Google Docs. If that’s a problem or you don’t want to be locked into the Google ecosystem, you might be interested in checking out five free alternatives that aren’t Microsoft 365.