How to Use Alt Keys in Google Sheets Just Like Excel

Excel is one of the best inventions on the planet for exploring unstructured data in a simple, fast, and intuitive way. One feature of Excel that makes it so fast to explore data are the Alt key and other keyboard shortcuts. I think there are a lot of reasons Google Sheets is actually better than Excel now, but native shortcuts is not one of them. So this guide will walk you through some ways to get shortcuts back in Google Sheets.

Alt Key Shortcuts

Alt key (or Option key if you’re on Mac) shortcuts: the only way to get these back easily is to use a Chrome extension. I tried a bunch of other ways — using Karabiner to remap keys, etc. — but a Chrome extension is by far the easiest and fastest way to get this working.

I built XLKeys for this purpose because I realized I could build exactly what I wanted and have it work flawlessly.

Getting Started

Once you download XLKeys from the Chrome Web Store (linked above), refresh whatever Google workbook you’re in. You should see a little XLKeys icon popup show up in your toolbar. Once you see that, you’re good to go. You can start using Alt keys just like you used to in Excel. Some examples:

• Alt+H,A,C: align center.
• Alt+H,A,L: align left.
• Alt+H,B,O: bottom border.
• Alt+H,E,A: clear all.
• Alt+H,B,A: apply all borders.
• Alt+H,B,N: remove borders.
• Alt+H,O,I: autofit column width.
• Alt+H,O,A: autofit row height.
• Alt+W,F,F: freeze rows and columns.
• Alt+W,V,G: toggle gridlines.
• Alt+H,H: open fill color picker.
• Alt+H,F,C: open font color picker.

Bonus: Number Formatting Cycle

While this article is mostly about Alt keys, there are some other features that are pretty handy and worth mentioning. The most used feature is the number formatting cycle: using Ctrl+Shift+1, you can cycle through all the common number formats to make cleaning up your workbook really fast.