Page 214 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

196 Cell Editing 101
Figure 3-5:
Worksheet after deleting the cell with the duplicate entry.
Don’t confuse the use of the Delete key and the Delete Cells command. When you press the Delete key, Excel automatically deletes just the contents of the cells that are selected (keeping whatever formatting is used intact), leaving seemingly blank cells in the worksheet. When you choose Delete Cells from the Delete button’s drop-down menu, Excel displays the Delete dialog box, which deletes the selected cells and then shifts the remaining cells in the direction that you designate (up or to the left) to fill in what would otherwise be blank cells.
If you know that you want to use the Shift Cells Up option when deleting the current cell selection, you don’t have to bother with opening the Delete dialog box at all: Simply click the Delete button (rather than its drop-down button), and Excel instantly deletes the selection and pulls all remaining cells up.
Can I just squeeze this in here?
The Insert command button in the Editing group of the Ribbon’s Home tab
is set very much like the Delete button immediately below it. You click the Insert button’s drop-down button and then its Insert Cells option (or press Alt+HII) to open an Insert dialog box, where you indicate how Excel is to deal with existing cell entries in order to accommodate the blank cells you need to squeeze in.
For example, suppose that you discover that you’ve left out three numbers from a column of summed numbers and that these values should have appeared in the middle of the column. To make this edit, position the cell cursor in the first cell of those cells whose values need to be shifted down to make room for the three missing entries and then drag the cell cursor down