What does the Control key allow you to do in Excel?

Answer 1

Pressing the Control key itself does not do anything in Excel. It is when you combine it with other keys that you can do a wide range of things. Some of the most common are Control - C to copy, Control - X to cut, Control - V to paste, Control - B to bold. Combinations with other letters do things too. You can also used Control in combination with other keys, not just letters. Control - 1 will open the Format Cells dialog box. Control - Home brings you back to cell A1. There are lots of others.

Using keyboard shortcuts is very useful and once you get used to them you will find that you can use them a lot and that they are often quicker than using the mouse, even though people think it is slower and more awkward. So if you want to get good at using Excel, learning about using shortcut keys is one thing that is very useful to do. The Control key is just one of the keys that you can use with others for shortcuts.

Answer 2

Like all Microsoft applications, there are many control keys in Excel, far more than most people know and use. Standard ones include Ctrl - C to copy, Ctrl - S to save, Ctrl - Z to undo etc. Special ones for Excel include Ctrl - D to copy down, Ctrl - T to make a table etc. You can use other characters or numbers to do things like Ctrl - 2 to bold, Ctrl - % to format to percentage Ctrl - ; to enter the current date etc. There are all of these and many others that you can use in Excel to do all sorts of things with the keyboard.