Navigating Through The Workbook

If you use excel very often, you will find that it can become extremely tedious to use the mouse in controlling all functions.

Here is my first quick list of amazing excel shortcuts that will speed up your spreadsheet building.

Navigating Through The Workbook
Use these shortcuts to move around to different sheets in the workbook.

Ctrl + Page Up = Move up 1 Sheet
Ctrl + Page Down = Move down 1 Sheet

Alt + Page Up = Move left a screen on current sheet
Alt + Page Down = Move right a screen on current sheet
(ie. viewing columns A - U, hit the shortcut key and you will then be viewing columns U - AO)

Ctrl + Home = Takes you to cell A1
Ctrl + End = Takes you to last cell with content within current sheet

Ctrl + G = Opens "Go To" dialog bog.  Allows you to enter cell reference and go to that cell

F2 = inserts cursor into cell in order to edit content
     Home = inserts cursor at beginning of content
     End = Inserts cursor at end of content
     Ctrl + Left/Right Arrows = Moves cursor one word at a time to the left/right

Tab = Moves one cell to the right
Shift + Tab = Moves one cell to the left

Simple Loan Amortization Schedule built by Excel

Did you know that on a $200,000 mortgage you will end up paying nearly $103,000 in interest! And that's at a super low rate of 3%.  Ever wanted to be able to see how this amount is calculated or be able to see how much money you could save in interest by paying a little more each month?  Or how about putting that nice chunk of tax return change into the principal of loan? How much can I save?

A loan amortization table is what you need.  It's a fairly simple mathematical process which I will not go over in detail here, but just so you know, excel has made this super easy for you.

Here's what you do.

1.  Open up a new excel sheet.

2. Right click on the "sheet 1" tab at the bottom.

3. Select "Insert" and then click the spreadsheet solutions tab.

4. There it is!  Your Loan Amortization Schedule.

From there it is pretty straightforward.  Just enter in the information relevant to your loan and voila!  You can see a detailed run down of every payment you will make over the life of your loan or mortgage.

Surprised at how much interest you will end up paying?  Figure out how much you can save by entering a figure in the optional extra payments field.

This is a super simple way to build a loan amortization schedule in excel.  Later on I will walk through how to build one from scratch which will give you much more freedom and functionality than this simple amortization table.