Sometimes when you’re building a formula the range that you select is further down the sheet than the formula cell. There is a keyboard shortcut that you can press to return to the formula cell. Shout out to Mike Girvin for sharing this tip in his latest book Excel the Only App that Matters.

In the image below we need to enter a formula in cell A2 to add up the sales starting in cell A5.

After we insert the SUM function, we can use a keyboard shortcut to select the range.

To select a long vertical range, you can click the first cell in the range and hold the Control and Shift keys down and press the down arrow. This works if there are no blank rows in the range.

Once we have selected the range you can see in the image below that we can no longer see the formula cell where we started.

To return to the formula cell we can use the keyboard shortcut Control and the Backspace.

Another technique that also achieves this is to press the F4 function key after selecting the range. That adds the $ signs to the reference and it also takes you back to the active formula cell.