Concepts

What do the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys do?

These keys allow you to zip around your document with greater efficiency.

Home

The Home key moves the cell cursor to the left-most column in the same row. For example, if the cell cursor were in C4, pressing the Home key would reposition it at cell A4.

Ctrl-Home

(Press and hold the Ctrl key followed by the Home key.) This key combination will take you to the first cell in the document–A1.

Ctrl-End

This key combination will take you to the intersection of the right-most used cell and bottom-most used cell.

End

The End key is a little more interesting. The End key by itself is a toggle key. It will turn on and off the End Mode.

End, Home

(Press and release the End key followed by the Home key. This key combination is the same as Ctrl-End. It will take you to the intersection of the right-most used cell and bottom-most used cell.

End, <arrow>

(Press and release the End key followed by one of the arrow keys.) This key will move you to the next block of data in the direction of the arrow.

The Page Up key moves the contents of the display window down one full page. This seems odd at first, but the way to think about it is that it moves the field of view onto the spreadsheet up one full page. Here is an image to help you visualize it:

In the image above, the light area represents the portion of the spreadsheet which is visible in the display area of Excel. Since the display window has five rows in it, a Page Up would attempt to move this display window up four rows. (There is always one overlapping row left on the screen.) In this example, if the column headers were in the top row (row 1), Page Up would move the display area up the maximum distance which is three rows.

Page Down works the same way in the opposite direction.

For more information refer to the on-line help in Excel. (Go to Help/Contents and Index, search shortcut keys, select Microsoft Excel, and then "Move and scroll on a worksheet.")