I love Mac in general, but Excel sucks. All the function keys are different (why???!!!).
So, are there any hot keys to replace these old favorites (= highly necessary, essential keys)?
F2–To highlight a cell to alter the data.
F4–To switch around the $ for absolute/relative rows and columns.
I am going nuts without these. Thanks for your help and any other related advice.
OK, I KNOW someone knows this. Please help. Thanks.
Drop down the “Tools” menu, select “Customize,” click the “Keyboard” button, and change your desired commands to whatever keyboard shortcut you desire.
Yeah, but those function-key commands in Windows aren’t like regular commands like Cut or Paste. How do I specify the F2 or F4 commands?!
Thanks for your help.
I’m afraid F1 through F7 are reserved for Mac, and I’m not quite sure what you mean by “highlight a cell.” There are several ways to navigate to cells–arrows being one of them, or just clicking the cell–but once you are there the cell will accept anything you type. If you just want to edit an existing formula, click on the cell and you can edit the formula in the formula bar. If you need to toggle between relative and absolute references, highlight the cell, and press command t. I agree with you about the frustration with Excel for Mac. I’ve been using it since the first version (Microsoft’s first real application–save maybe Basic for my Altair–predating Windows by about two thousand years) and some of the keyboard shortcuts have just randomly changed. In the first versions command b cleared everything from your selection, now it makes everything bold, I changed it with the customize feature. Check out the help file, it’s way better than the help file for Excel for Windows.
I sympathize, but do keep in mind that we had it first.
Mac users were using Excel when PC users, mouseless and staring at amber or green screens, were using Lotus 123 for MS-DOS.
Is it our fault that Excel for Windows doesn’t obey the standards?
OK, OK, I’ll stop 
Microsoft applications are usually very flexible when it comes to keystroke assignments. Is there a menu command equivalent to what you’re trying to accomplish in each case, or is it keystroke-only? If it’s in the menus, you should be able to map a keystroke to it.
I don’t think there’s a menu item for it.
Sure, you can get to a cell; clicking on it then allows you to edit it.
But F2 was much more useful for a lot of things. You could go to a cell with the arrows and then “get into” it with F2 without having to use the mouse.
Another thing: If you want to go back within the cell to correct something while you’re still in it, using the left arrow moves you to the cell to the left. But if you hit F2 and then the left arrow key, you stayed within the cell.
Frustrating not to have that…
I will check for a command button, though.
BTW, why did Lotus 1-2-3 die? Because of MS’s marketing powers? But why would PC users have used Lotus when Mac users had Excel. Was it kind of like PowerPoint (which existed first for Mac–not sure why)?
As I recall (and this may be a techie urban legend), Microsoft was rather close-mouthed to its direct competitors Lotus and WordPerfect Corp. regarding Windows 3.0 and its APIs and capabilities and how it would differ from the didnt-set-the-world-on-fire Windows 2. Lotus owned the DOS spreadsheet world (and had not, as of that time, ever made anything for the Mac) and WordPerfect similarly was the ten-ton gorilla of word-processing (and again, although they’d explored the idea back in '84, they hadn’t as of yet made a Mac version). So when Windows 3 shipped, Word for Windows was ready, Excel for Windows was ready, and Lotus 123 and WordPerfect were not.
Many old-timer PC users (this from personal experience, not repeating techie legends) reviled Windows and either would not install it at all or would only run it if and when they needed newer programs that required it, after which they would exit Windows and return to DOS; they kept on using Lotus 123 and WordPerfect and other DOS apps and put things like “Dogs crawl under fences; programs crawl under Windows” in their email signature lines and made fun of newbie PC users who only knew Windows and could not get around from the command line.
But the GUI made the PC easier to use and learn for people starting from scratch, and the APIs implemented standards; you could copy text in Word and paste it into a cell in Excel (new for PCs, DOS has no “clipboard”); you could use your mouse and easly and consistently find the commands you wanted from the menus if you didn’t know the keystroke (most DOS programs had a way of displaying the commands, but there was no consistency on how or what those commands were); and it just looked more appealing. So the rate at which PCs were selling shot up, and so did the market share of Word and Excel.
By the time Lotus and WordPerfect got Windows versions out, they were playing catch-up. They also shot themselves in the foot by releasing Windows versions that weren’t entirely user-friendly for their established DOS-user base —little inconsistencies and changes in keystroke commands and other behaviors that drove long-term 123 and WordPerfect users nuts. (If you ever watch DOS Lotus 123 or WordPerfect users work, you’ll notice they touch-type commands and they don’t look at the screen much; change the order of items in a menu and they are screwed. Where a non-DOS person klutzing around in it like me would hit the DOS command to bring up the menu and then read the choices and arrow down or hit the underlined letter to make the command happen, they would go slash-rightarrow-rightarrow-downarrow-esc, or Alt-F7, Ctrl-Shift-F6, 5 or something like that with the same ease that I type the word “type”. So when these folks tried the Windows version, the little inconsistencies slowed them down. Besides, Windows itself slowed them down (the DOS versions were so much faster and more responsive on the same hardware). So they kept their DOS versions. And I think both Lotus and WordPerfect Corp kept releasing new DOS versions. So the Windows versions didn’t attract lots of new users and didn’t become the new thing for their old users.
Oh, and I don’t really know why the DOS versions of Excel and Word had never caught on in the PC world. I tried them both and they weren’t bad (easier by far for me to comprehend than Lotus 123 or WP, but then I came from a Mac-user’s familiarity with Mac Word and Mac Excel).
Try using Excel without a mouse, though, and you’ll see that it’s not quite as user-friendly (although it’s still usable); to anybody today (and to Mac users then), the format of DOS Excel’s menus “just makes sense” whereas the Lotus 123 format seems awkward (hit the slash key and the menutitles would come up in a horizontal list; arrow to the one you want and hit enter (? I think ?) and the menutitles would be replaced with the menu commands of that menu; hit Esc and you’d go back one menu-level) but remember that back then there was no standard “way to do menus” for DOS, so the Microsoft way didn’t necessarily “just make sense” and were also derided as being too “Mac-like”. Excel for DOS may have been feature-limited, too, I don’t recall. Lotus users said it took longer to do anything.
As for Word, it wasn’t WYSIWYG any more than WordPerfect was, due to the limitations of character-display on a DOS screen. And again you would not have had a mouse. In WordPerfect you’d slam down a start-select “block”, arrow over to the other end of a piece of text and slam down an end-select “block” and then hit commands to format or cut or count what you’d selected; in Word you’d hold down your shift key and use the arrow cursors to select until you reached your destination and then hit other modifier keys (Alt?) to bring up menus and other keys to make your menu selection. The advantages of Word weren’t exactly compelling.
Other than that, probably just momentum and installed user-base and compatibility with existing documents and stuff likely to be sent from other users. And Microsoft didn’t go on an all-out push to popularize either product. They had other plans in mind, I guess 