I'm sure most of you know the Bold, Italic, and Underline shortcuts as well as you know your own name. (I’ve included them because someone will take me to task if I leave them out.) The rest of these shortcuts are less well known, even though you might actually need to apply, say, the Currency format to data more often than Underline or Italic.

These are standard, practical shortcuts that can save you time in earlier versions of Excel — but they’re especially useful in Excel 2007. The formats are accessible from the Home tab in Excel 2007, but it could be years, possibly decades, before you develop the habit of locating them quickly. If you’re working in a different tab, you don’t want to have to keep switching back to the Home tab just to format the data you’re working on.