It becomes increasingly important to efficiently select the cells you are working with, in an OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet, as your spreadsheet gets bigger and bigger. Those of you who have worked with files that are thousands of rows long know what I mean. Learning a few simple keyboard shortcuts, will make your productivity increasetremendously! In this episode, we cover a few of the most useful shortcuts for selecting cells in an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet. Once you have the cells you want selected, you can use your selection to apply formatting to make your spreadsheet look nice, or use the values of your selection in calculating formulas.

If you are not used to using keyboard shortcuts, take it from me, they are worth the effort you put into learning them. Start with the one you find most useful like “Control-A” to select all the cells in the spreadsheet. Write it down on a piece of paper next to your computer and work it into your daily spreadsheet activities. Before you know it, you can throw that piece of paper away and replace it with a new keyboard shortcut.

On a side note, this has been a very exciting episode for me to produce. It is the first episode produced entirely using open source software. This has been a goal of mine since I started this blog, and I look forward to continuing to use these tools to create more episodes. Hopefully in the near future I will be able to produce some “behind the scenes” episodes on the open source tools I’ve used for creating these screencasts.