Utah Community Learning

Excel or Google Sheets, and why I keep hitting the wrong shortcut

Before we go any further, we ought to settle which program you will actually use. I would hate for you to build your first sheet and then get stuck on something small, like where the save button has gone off to.

The truth is, it mostly does not matter. Excel and Google Sheets do about 90% of the same things. For everyday use, budgets, trackers, sign-up sheets, the differences are small enough that I will not pretend one is far better than the other. Here is how I actually think it through when I pick:

Use Google Sheets if: - You want it free and you already have a Google account - More than one person needs to look at or edit it (sharing is far easier) - You mostly work from different devices, like your phone and a laptop that are not the same one every time

Use Excel if: - You already have Microsoft 365 through work or school - You are doing bigger, more complex work eventually, pivot tables, big datasets (more on my own limits there later in the course) - You want it to work fine with no wifi

For most of what we do in this course, either one is fine. If you do not already have a strong opinion, I would start with Google Sheets, because it is free and you can open it this very minute in a browser tab. That is the whole decision. Do not fret over it.

Now, about those shortcuts

I will confess something. I use both programs depending on the week, work in one, the home budget in the other, and my hands do not care which one I am in. I will confidently hit Ctrl and something in Google Sheets that does nothing at all, or worse, does the wrong thing, because it is an Excel shortcut. Then I sit there a moment wondering why it did not work. It is a little embarrassing to admit, being "the spreadsheet lady," but it is simply true.

So when I demonstrate something in class, I will tell you which program I am in, and if I go blank on a shortcut, I will just say so rather than pretend I meant to click around the long way. That is the more useful skill anyhow: knowing how to find the thing when your fingers forget it.

A quick, humbling story

I tried to teach my husband Casey to sort a table once. A simple thing, click sort, done. He clicked the little arrow, but he only selected one column instead of the whole table, and hit sort. Every row scrambled. Names beside the wrong numbers, dates that no longer matched a thing. He looked at me as though the computer had betrayed him personally.

I fixed it in about ten seconds, undo, then sort the whole range properly. But he still brings it up, months later, as though it were somehow my fault for being in the room when it happened.

Here is the real lesson in it, though. Sorting only what you have selected, instead of the whole table, is very likely the single most common way people wreck a sheet by accident. It does not delete anything. It just shuffles the rows so they no longer line up, which is almost worse, because it LOOKS fine at first glance.

The fix, in both programs: before you sort, either select the entire range of data (not just one column), or use "Sort range" and make sure the box for "expand the selection" or "include all columns" is checked. In Google Sheets in particular, if you right-click and choose sort, it will usually ask you. Read that little prompt. I know, nobody reads prompts. Read that one.

If you do scramble it, do not panic. Undo (Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z) usually saves you completely, so long as you catch it fast and have not done ten other things since.

Practical steps for today

Pick one program. If you are not sure, open Google Sheets in a browser tab right now.
Make a blank sheet and just type five rows of fake data into two columns, anything at all, names and numbers.
Select only column A and try sorting it. Watch it scramble against column B.
Undo it.
Now select both columns together and sort again. Notice it stays lined up.

That is the whole exercise. It is small on purpose. I would rather you make this mistake now, on made-up data, than three months into your real budget sheet.

One opinion I will plant here early: you do not need the fancier program, the fancier template, or the fancier anything to make this work. A spreadsheet only needs to answer a question you actually have. The tool is the least interesting part of this whole course, and I say that as a woman whose job is, technically, "the tool."

Before next time

Just get comfortable opening whichever program you picked, typing into it, and undoing your mistakes without panic. That, truly, is most of the battle.