Switching to a Mac has its advantages but Excel shortcuts isn’t one of them. The main gripe I have is that keyboard shortcuts should be the same in every version of Excel, yet the Windows and Mac worlds are light-years apart. The F2 key is a fundamental shortcut I learned early in my Excel life. It edits the active cell and positions the cursor at the end of the cell contents. You want to edit a formula, hit the F2 key. In Excel for Mac the F2 key cuts text from the active cell.

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How could they do this? What were they thinking? Window users are screwed when it comes to keyboard shortcuts in Excel for Mac. Remember that well. Edit the Active Cell in Excel for Mac CONTROL+U is the new F2 when you’re using Excel with a Mac. If you want to edit the active cell use the keyboard shortcut CONTROL+U.

If you use F2 to edit a cell on a Mac, remember your screwed, and think FU. Then take control of the situation and use CONTROL+U to edit that cell and get on with your life. • Brian Hi Davi, The way that you’ll have to get it to work is this: In your System Preferences / Keyboard / Keyboard, you’ll need to have the checkbox “Use all F1, F2, etc keys as standard function keys” checked. This will let you use the F2 key in Excel without dimming your screen. This means though you have to hit the Fn + F2/F3 keys to dim/brighten your screen etc. Given the number of times I actually change my screen brightness vs the number of times I have to edit a cell in Excel, it’s a worthy change. The one weird (though good, if you like it as so) aspect of doing so is that the volume/mute function keys will still work without hitting the Fn key together, which is a pain in the butt because you can’t use F10~F12 as standard keys.

Which then means you can’t map Insert a Sheet to F10 or Insert Chart to Shift F10, which is the standard Windows Excel mapping. (and don’t get me started about the ultra-retardation in the Windows ‘Ribbon’ recently. I’ve got all of that junk turned off permanently, although in Redmond’s Apple-esque wisdom, there is a lot of functionality in the Ribbon that isn’t available in the pulldown menus. I understand to increase their sales, MS has to keep mucking with their Office Suite, but they do it at the expense of everyone else who’s bought it up to that point). Time to switch to Ubuntu 10, methinks. • Brian No worries. As a heavy PC user, I use this program to remap most of my keys on the Mac to make the transition back and forth easier, particularly on my MacPro.

Several nice things that have eased my frustration with a ‘must-use-a-mouse’ Mac (didn’t they ever think of users who like using a keyboard?): * open files in the Finder when you hit ‘Enter’, rather than the retarded ‘Command-O’. On a Mac, this for some unknown reason seems to enter into ‘Rename File’ mode normally. * map the eject CD button to ‘Delete’ (the Mac ‘Delete’ key is actually a Backspace key). * map the right Option key to be used with the up/down arrow keys to be Page Up/Page Down – it’s frustrating to see that Apple thinks that when people use keyboard shortcuts, they like to use both hands (I think it’s normally fn+Up/Down). • Brian Hi Jeff, Actually, here’s the reason Finder’s default key mapping is “retarded”. When you try to open a file with the context of an application like Word, Excel, or any other application, the application will pop open an instance of the File Chooser dialog box, which is actually just another view of Finder. Mac vs dell for photoshop. In this dialog, you don’t hit Command-O to select the file you want to open; you hit Enter (or double click for those who don’t like to use the keyboard, but then, this thread shouldn’t be of any interest to you in the first place) to open the file.