• This is driving me a little bit crazy. In my old PC days I used to press either F5 or F9 (I can't remember) to have Excel recalculate. What is the Mac equivalent?
  • Although you usually use the Go To feature in Excel 2016 to move the cell cursor to a new cell in the worksheet, you can also use this feature to select a range of cells. When you choose the Go To option from the Find & Select button’s drop-down menu on the Home tab of the Ribbon (or press Ctrl+G or F5), Excel displays a Go To dialog box.

Free Excel Crash Course. Learn Go To Special (F5) with CFI’s Free Excel Crash Course.This course gives you the most important spreadsheet formulas, Excel keyboard shortcuts (Mac and PC) Excel Shortcuts PC Mac Excel Shortcuts - List of the most important & common MS Excel shortcuts for PC & Mac users, finance, accounting professions. Keyboard shortcuts speed up your modeling skills and save time. In Windows on your Mac, click in the right side of the taskbar, click the Boot Camp icon, then choose Boot Camp Control Panel. If a User Account Control dialog appears, click Yes. Select or deselect “Use all F1, F2 etc. Keys as standard function keys.”.

Control features on your Mac

By default, the top row of keys on your Apple keyboard control many different features on your Mac. For example, pressing the keys with speaker icons adjusts the volume.

If your Mac has a Touch Bar, learn about using function keys on MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

Use standard function keys

F5 In Excel For MacF5 in excel for mac shortcut

Standard function keys work differently depending on the app and the keyboard shortcuts that you've set up. Some apps have their own keyboard shortcut preferences that you can customize.

F5 In Excel For Mac Shortcut

To use the standard function keys, hold the Fn (Function) key when pressing a function key. For example, pressing both Fn and F12 (speaker icon) performs the action assigned to the F12 key instead of raising the volume of your speakers.

If your keyboard doesn’t have an Fn key, try pressing and holding the Control key when pressing a function key.

Change the default function key behavior

If you want to change the top row of keys to work as standard function keys without holding the Fn key, follow these steps:

  1. Choose Apple menu  > System Preferences.
  2. Click Keyboard.
  3. Select 'Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys'.

If you don't see 'Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys'

If you don't see 'Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys', you might be using a keyboard not made by Apple. These keyboards might need a utility to change the keyboard functions. Check with your keyboard manufacturer for more information.

Learn more

Learn about using function keys on MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.

An ongoing shortfall on the Mac (for me) has always been the lack of Alt-key control of the menus in Office--in Word, PowerPoint and especially Excel. Since I can't take 'no' for an answer I thought I'd try this forum, although Apple.com doesn't seem to have a place for non-Apple apps for the Mac.


I am looking for Alt-key navigation for the Mac versions of Windows Office (at least as available through Windows Office 2003 versions). If you've never used Excel on a Windows machine, you will likely misunderstand this request (based on my review of Google search results). In Windows Excel 2003, you can access any menu command through the keyboard in a very efficient way.


A lot of Mac people respond to Alt-key questions with the standard shortcuts (Command 'O' is open) or thinking the problem is that there is user confusion because there is no Alt key ('it's the Option or Command key'). All this is known and used often. I'm also not interested in the Accessibility feature (Ctrl-F2) which is very slow compared to direct access since you're essentially replicating a mouse action, rather than an actual keyboard shortcut. This question is application specific (Office); I know about OS system shortcuts (and use those often as well).


F5 In Excel For Macs

What I am interested in is leveraging keyboard commands, since although not GUI and oh-so-not-nouveau- cool, are the old fashioned way expert users get work done really fast. When you need to pound in data, keeping your hands on the keyboard is always faster than typing, the mouse/eye, then hands back to typing, then mouse/eye.


What I am looking for is some trickery, macro, add-in, something that replicates being able to hold down the 'Alt' (option or command or control on the Mac) key and type TOG (for example), which will instantly execute toggling grid on or off (Tools/Option/Grid). WAO (window/arrange/horizontal), and so on through tens or hundreds of very frequently used menu combinations. In addition to just being faster, this approach is faster if you get 'mouse fatigue' (eye strain or wrist/hand strain or both), especially on multiple and large displays at high resolution. With Windows Alt key navigation, you can navigate by touch typing even if you're using an infrequently used menu combination by holding down the Alt key and reading the menu, seeing the shortcut (underlined letter), typing it, and moving on to the next submenu (or the next work task).


F5 In Excel For Macbook Pro

Granted, Microsoft's new Ribbon interface (started on Office 2007 on Windows) seems to indicate the world thinks more GUI is needed, but I've yet to find an expert user who doesn't hate it. Fortunately in 'Ribbon' versions of Office, you can still type most Alt key shortcuts from memory. They're not documented anymore since there are no 'menus' with the Ribbon. Sort of the world's largest collection of Easter Eggs.


F5 In Excel For Mac Os

I'm bilingual Windows/Mac. I've always had Macs at home, and mostly Windows at work (except for two companies... one of which was Apple!). I'm resurrecting this issue because I'm really kind of aggravated that when I have serious Excel work to do for my personal life, I do it on my work computer because the mouse/menu approach is so much slower.

F5 In Excel On Mac


F5 In Excel For MacF5 In Excel For Mac

So, isn't there some Add-in that can simulate the keyboard shortcuts at least partial Windows users know and love (and are really better... it's ok guys, sometimes one can learn from the dark side).

F5 Excel Macro

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