MS-Excel / Excel 2003

AutoSelect at Your Service

AutoSelect is a great timesaving feature that enables you to select an entire table of data as a single cell selection in a couple of double-clicks of the mouse. To use AutoSelect to select your table, follow these few steps:

  1. Position the mouse pointer in the first cell in the table of data you want to select.
    Note that for this procedure to work, the columns and rows of the table must not contain blanks.
  2. Position the mouse pointer somewhere along the bottom border of the cell pointer and then, when the mouse pointer changes to an arrowhead pointing to crisscrossed double-headed arrows, hold down the Shift key and double-click the mouse.
    If you forget to hold down the Shift key before you double-click, the cell pointer just jumps to the last occupied cell in the column without extending the cell selection.
  3. Position the mouse pointer somewhere along the right edge of the current cell selection and then, when the mouse pointer changes to an arrowhead pointing to crisscrossed doubleheaded arrows - hold down the Shift key and double-click the mouse a second time.
    After you double-click the right edge of the first cell selection (while holding down the Shift key to extend it), Excel extends the cell selection to include all the columns of data in the table, stopping automatically at the first blank row in the worksheet.
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