Editing Cells and Ranges

Editing Worksheet Cells & Ranges

As you add content to your worksheets – text, numbers, dates and times, formulas, and functions – you’ll need to edit them – after all, nobody’s perfect, and information changes over time.

The simplest way to do that is to just retype whatever’s in the cell. Just click to select the cell you want to edit and type the new content. This can be to replace one name with another, to enter a different amount or date, anything. And even if you only wanted to fix a typo, it can sometimes be faster and easier than editing the content directly in the cell.

For example, if I type June in this cell and meant to type July, It’s faster to just select the cell and type July.

If, on the other hand, I typed “First Quarter Sales” and should have typed “Third Quarter Sales,” it’s easier to just use the Formula bar and select the word First and then type Third to replace just that.

So each situation will require a different editing solution, but now you’ll know what your options are.

So – to edit a single cell, you can click once on the cell to select it and type the replacement content.

You can also edit the cell directly on the Formula bar – select a cell and then use your mouse and/or the backspace and delete keys to edit the content there. Here, I’m correcting the spelling of the word in cell B11.

You can also double-click in the cell to activate your cursor there and use the mouse to select just part of the content and correct it, and/or use the Backspace and Delete keys to edit the content – in the cell itself. I’m editing the title in cell A1 to remove the word Division, replacing that with Department Sales and then removing the word where it appears again after the word “by”.

To edit cell ranges, the same method we use to do initial data entry in a range of cells works, too.

If I wanted to change this series of names from Mary, Bob, and Susan to Jim, Ellen, and Sam, I can select the range and type my replacements, pressing the Enter key after each new name is typed.

I can also select any range of cells, press Delete, and while it’s still selected, type new values in each cell and press Enter to move to the next cell in the range. Here, I’m changing the names in the European Sales Department to Ian, Marcella, and Rosa.

You’ll learn more about editing your worksheet content in terms of its appearance and functionality – by applying various forms of formatting – in our other videos. But for now, you can update and correct the content of any cell in your worksheet, easily!