Using Undo, Redo, and Repeat

Using Undo, Redo, and Repeat in Excel Worksheets

Undo is my best friend. In fact, I’ve found myself thinking “Undo! Undo!” when I break or spill something around the house. Wouldn’t that be easier than sweeping up the mess?

Well, until they computerize everything in our lives, we’ll have to get out the broom to clean up. But when it comes to Excel, reversing a mistake is as easy as the click of a button or the press of a keyboard shortcut.

And you probably knew that, as the process is the same in just about every software application on the planet. There’s an Undo button and it usually looks like an arrow swirling to the left. And Ctrl + Z is Undo in every Windows application known to humanity.

But did you know about Undo-ing several steps, essentially going back in time to the point before you made an original mistake that you’ve maybe tried to fix or didn’t realize you’d made until the next few things you did didn’t work out as planned?

That tiny triangle next to the Undo button on the Quick Access Toolbar shows you a list of the last 16 things you did. Far fewer than Word and many other applications offer you, but that’s still pretty helpful. Another important thing to keep in mind - the Undo list is only saved while the worksheet is open, in your current work session – so once you close a worksheet, the list of things you can undo is lost.

So, as you can see, I’ve made some formatting changes to the font, applied a border, cleared cells of their content, performed a SUM function, and then used the Fill handle to Autofill a series. The last thing I did is at the top of the list, so I can go back in time in the proper order, should I need to.

Here, using the list, I’m undoing everything I’ve done, all the way back to when I started using this sheet in my current session. I could, of course, just click the Undo button or press Ctrl + Z to undo one thing at a time, but using the list allows me to go back to a specific point in time with a single click.

As you can see, the Redo button is now active and showing me, with its own triangle, a list of things I can redo. So I can go forward in time, redoing what I’ve undone.

Notice, when I mouse over that Redo button, that its keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + Y. This is extremely handy when you don’t want to redo something you’ve undone, but want to repeat the last thing you did.

For example, if I want to repeat the last thing I did in a series of cells, I can do it once in the first desired cell, and then in each subsequent cell, I can press Ctrl + Y and my last action is repeated. Here, I’m applying a colored shading to each of the rows for the cities that I know have been verified for accuracy in terms of the population and housing cost data. Only I know which ones have been checked, so it’s not something I can automate with conditional formatting or anything like that.

Pretty handy, no? That’s one of my favorite shortcuts, and it’s saved me tons of time and made my worksheets even more consistent when that’s what I needed.