How Much Time Can You Save With Excel Shortcuts?

FourSquare Training Article

Why Did we Run our Excel Shortcuts Experiment?

There are an awful lot of lists of Excel shortcut keys available Online and we even have one ourselves. What we noticed though is that whilst these lists all tell us that we can save time with Excel shortcuts, none of them tell us exactly how much time they actually save.

We thought that we might remedy this situation, so we ran a small experiment to find out how much faster Excel shortcuts really are.

We decided to compare ten Excel shortcut keys with the equivalent manual "point and click" actions to see what the difference in time duration actually was when performing the tasks.

Our test wasn't the most scientific in the world but it did show without any doubt that it is significantly faster to use Excel shortcuts than it is not to use them. You can see what we found below, but if you are already convinced that Excel shortcuts save you time then you can go straight to our Concise Guide to Excel Shortcuts here: Excel Shortcut Guide. At the time of writing we cover over one hundred and forty different Excel shortcuts.

Do Excel Shortcut Keys Really Save Time? Here's a Quick Overview of our Findings:

1. Most Excel shortcuts can be performed in 2 seconds or less. We actually rounded up to 2 seconds for several of these when we tested.
2. Some of the most common tasks save the most time when performed with shortcuts. The Save As shortcut (F12), for instance, was a whopping 3 seconds faster than its manual equivalent.
3. We found Excel shortcut keys to be on average 75 percent quicker than their manual counterparts.
4. You can shave a whole second off even the quickest Excel tasks with shortcut keys.
5. Excel shortcut keys significantly enhance productivity.

Excel Shortcut Speed Test Results Table

And here are the results which we spun into a quick Excel table.

In our test, Excel shortcuts worked out to be 75% faster because 42 seconds is 175% of 24 seconds, if we take 24 seconds as the benchmark time that the tasks should have taken. Its pure coincidence that we arrived at such a mathematically convenient number, but because we have we can say that in our unscientific little experiment it took 3/4s more time to achieve the same results in Excel when we didn't make use of the available shortcuts. That's a really significant leap in performance!

One very interesting thing that we can tell from our data is that some Excel shortcuts save much more significant amounts of time and effort than others. Were we to expand the experiment at some point in the future, it would no doubt give us additional information about which Excel shortcuts are the most useful to learn. The ones that you use most are obviously going to save the most time overall, but also being aware of the ones that offer the biggest time savings would definitely be beneficial too.

Were we to then start extrapolating the productivity time-savings across entire organisations and workforces, the efficiency savings would very quickly stack up into something really significant.

For a more in-depth explanation of the best ways to calculate time efficiency savings (and losses), there's a great thread over at StackOverflow which you can find here: How to calculate percentage improvement in response time for performance testing.

If you want to do something really cool with the screenshot of our Excel Shortcut speed test results, you can take a photo of it and use Excel's Insert Data from a Picture feature, by following the instructions on the Microsoft website here: Insert data from a picture. Now you can have your own fully-functioning spreadsheet of our findings, and perhaps even add some more data of your own.

And here's the world's most self-explanatory pie chart!

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