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With Excel, you can perform a variety of operations with data: perform complex mathematical operations, create tables, charts and graphs. But none of these actions are possible without the skills of highlighting tables in Excel. At first glance, everything is simple, but there are as many as three ways to do this. And each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages. And each of these methods has its own varieties.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these methods and in what situations they can be used. Selecting a table is necessary to use formulas, edit the appearance of cells, and perform other operations. Get ready, it will be interesting and very informative.
How to select a table using the Shift key
This method is pretty easy to learn. Of course, its implementation takes a little longer than the previous ones, but in some cases it is better and more convenient than the others. Especially when there is a little dexterity. To select a table in this way, you need to do the following:
- Click on the top left cell of the table.
- Hold down the Shift key. After that, click on the lowest right cell of this range. After that, it is allowed to lower it.
- If it turned out that the table is huge and does not fit within one screen, then first you need to click on the starting point, then scroll the table to the very end and then perform step 2.
After completing these steps, the entire table will be selected. You can select it both starting from the bottom cell, and from the top. A clear order in this case is optional. 
Hotkeys for table selection
At first glance, there is no need for hotkeys. After all, you can do all the operations with the mouse. But if you look at real Excel professionals, you might be surprised at how fast they perform even the most complex operations with this program. And all thanks to hot keys.
At first they will be quite difficult to remember. But when it comes to practice, they will be remembered very quickly. The return on hot keys will be truly colossal. Here you will see. What keyboard shortcuts can be used to select a table with Excel data? The clear list is as follows:
- CTRL+A. Selects the entire existing table, including empty cells. If a person uses the version of the office for Mac OS, then the same combination is Cmd + A. It is important to pay attention to one nuance. When a person presses hotkeys, you need to make sure that the cell was previously selected using the left mouse button. This is necessary in order to transfer focus to the window. Otherwise, a hotkey combination in another program may work. The problem is that it can be used in all applications, so you need to pay special attention to this nuance. First you need to click on the table cell, and only after that press Ctrl + A.
- The first time after pressing this combination, the entire table is selected. If you click it again, the sheet will be selected.
One more nuance. The cursor must be placed inside the table itself, and not any arbitrary section of the table. If you put it outside the range designated for the table, then the entire sheet will be selected.
By the way, this is not the only hotkey combination. If you use the Ctrl key and the arrow, you can also sequentially select different areas. If you use the Ctrl + mouse key, you can select only individual cells of the table or specific columns, not including the rest. As for the Shift button, it allows you to do the same. The difference is that the Shift button selects only adjacent columns and rows, while the Ctrl button allows you to act more precisely and select, for example, only the first and last column.
How to select a table in Excel with the mouse
And now let’s start looking at the most common method of selecting cells in Excel. It is also considered the simplest, because its basic principle is the same as in any other program. You can select a table with the mouse. However, this method also has a drawback. If the table is very large, then you can pretty much suffer until you select the desired area. However, people for this range size also use this method simply because they are already used to it. So, first of all, we need to left-click on the top leftmost cell and hold down the corresponding button. After that, the cursor moves to the lower right corner of the required range, after which the button is released.
Of course, you can also use the opposite end of the table for selection, starting from the lower right corner and ending with the upper left. It all depends on where the person is in the table when he got the idea to highlight it.
In general, you can use all possible ways of selecting with the mouse. This will not change the end result.
So, we have considered the most common ways to select a table using a combination of hot keys, the Shift key held down, or the standard method using the most ordinary mouse. Which one to use is up to you. The main thing is that you own all the described methods. You can practice before you start directly following the tips described in this article. This will help you perform all these actions more confidently. In general, it is recommended when learning any computer program to first create a text document,
There are some other ways to perform cell selection, but they are not so often used in practice and are highly professional. It’s about macros. They are used when you need to regularly perform the same type of action. And this will not be quite a classic selection of a table, since it will be carried out at the level of commands that the computer must execute. Recording macros requires basic programming skills, so we will leave this topic for later.