Guides / Keyboard shortcuts
Excel keyboard shortcuts for working with sheets
Everything you can do to a sheet tab with the mouse, you can do from the keyboard in Excel for Windows. Ribbon sequences like Alt, H, O, R are pressed one after another, not held together.
1Moving between sheets
| Shortcut | Does |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+Page Down | Next sheet |
| Ctrl+Page Up | Previous sheet |
F5 or Ctrl+G, then 'Sheet name'!A1 | Jump to a sheet by exact name |
| Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+F6 | Next open workbook window |
Without Page keys on a laptop, Ctrl+Fn+↑/↓ usually stands in for them.
2Selecting several sheets
| Shortcut | Does |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+Shift+Page Down | Add the next sheet to the selection |
| Ctrl+Shift+Page Up | Add the previous sheet to the selection |
While sheets are grouped, anything you type goes into all of them — the title bar shows Group as a warning. Click any tab outside the group, or right-click a tab › Ungroup Sheets, to stop.
3Inserting, renaming and organising
| Shortcut | Does |
|---|---|
| Shift+F11 | Insert a new worksheet |
| Alt, H, O, R | Rename the sheet |
| Alt, H, O, M | Move or copy the sheet |
| Alt, H, O, T | Tab colour |
| Alt, H, O, U, S | Hide the sheet |
| Alt, H, O, U, H | Unhide a sheet |
| Alt, H, D, S | Delete the sheet |
The Excel 2003 menu sequence Alt, O, H, R still renames a sheet in current versions, if that is what your fingers know. Very hidden sheets cannot be reached from any shortcut — see how to unhide very hidden sheets.
4What Excel has no shortcut for
There is no built-in way to search sheets by part of their name and jump to the match. Ctrl+Page Down walks one sheet at a time, and Go To needs the exact name. In a workbook with forty sheets, that is the gap — and the reason large workbooks feel slow to navigate.
Ctrl+Shift+S, type, Enter. Vertical Tabs adds the missing shortcut: search every sheet by any part of its name, pick with the arrow keys, and land in the sheet with the keyboard ready. Every sheet remembers its active cell.
See Vertical Tabs →