

Today, we are excited to announce general availability for custom keyboard shortcuts for Office Add-ins in Excel. Over the past several years, we’ve heard from many partners and developers about the need for custom keyboard shortcuts to help their users work more efficiently. This is especially powerful in Excel where you may need to repeat the same action several times during a single workflow. Keyboard shortcuts are also critical for users with mobility or vision disabilities because they provide an alternative to using a mouse. Office has hundreds of native keyboard shortcuts that enable power users to work more efficiently. it's ok guys, sometimes one can learn from the dark side).This blog is the first of a series highlighting custom keyboard shortcuts for Office Add-ins in Excel.
#CHANGE MAC EXCEL KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS WINDOWS#
So, isn't there some Add-in that can simulate the keyboard shortcuts at least partial Windows users know and love (and are really better. I'm resurrecting this issue because I'm really kind of aggravated that when I have serious Excel work to do for my personal life, I do it on my work computer because the mouse/menu approach is so much slower. I''ve always had Macs at home, and mostly Windows at work (except for two companies. Sort of the world's largest collection of Easter Eggs. They're not documented anymore since there are no "menus" with the Ribbon. Fortunately in "Ribbon" versions of Office, you can still type most Alt key shortcuts from memory. Granted, Microsoft's new Ribbon interface (started on Office 2007 on Windows) seems to indicate the world thinks more GUI is needed, but I've yet to find an expert user who doesn't hate it. With Windows Alt key navigation, you can navigate by touch typing even if you're using an infrequently used menu combination by holding down the Alt key and reading the menu, seeing the shortcut (underlined letter), typing it, and moving on to the next submenu (or the next work task). In addition to just being faster, this approach is faster if you get "mouse fatigue" (eye strain or wrist/hand strain or both), especially on multiple and large displays at high resolution. WAO (window/arrange/horizontal), and so on through tens or hundreds of very frequently used menu combinations. What I am looking for is some trickery, macro, add-in, something that replicates being able to hold down the "Alt" (option or command or control on the Mac) key and type TOG (for example), which will instantly execute toggling grid on or off (Tools/Option/Grid). When you need to pound in data, keeping your hands on the keyboard is always faster than typing, the mouse/eye, then hands back to typing, then mouse/eye. What I am interested in is leveraging keyboard commands, since although not GUI and oh-so-not-nouveau- cool, are the old fashioned way expert users get work done really fast. This question is application specific (Office) I know about OS system shortcuts (and use those often as well). I'm also not interested in the Accessibility feature (Ctrl-F2) which is very slow compared to direct access since you're essentially replicating a mouse action, rather than an actual keyboard shortcut. In Windows Excel 2003, you can access any menu command through the keyboard in a very efficient way.Ī lot of Mac people respond to Alt-key questions with the standard shortcuts (Command "O" is open) or thinking the problem is that there is user confusion because there is no Alt key ("it's the Option or Command key"). If you've never used Excel on a Windows machine, you will likely misunderstand this request (based on my review of Google search results). I am looking for Alt-key navigation for the Mac versions of Windows Office (at least as available through Windows Office 2003 versions).

Since I can't take "no" for an answer I thought I'd try this forum, although doesn't seem to have a place for non-Apple apps for the Mac. Just want to resurface this from a different users postĪn ongoing shortfall on the Mac (for me) has always been the lack of Alt-key control of the menus in Office-in Word, PowerPoint and especially Excel.
