Want to apply a strikethrough effect to text in Excel? All you need is this simple keyboard shortcut.
In Word 2013 (and 2010 and 2007), striking through text is easy and obvious: there’s a button for it on the Home tab of the Ribbon, near the icons for Bold, Italic and Underline:
However, if you look in the same area in Excel, there’s no strikethrough option — instead, you’ll see a shortcut for the Borders tool:
To apply strikethrough in Excel, you actually need to access the Font tab of the Format Cells dialog box:
There are several ways to get to Format Cells: you can click the small arrow in the bottom-right corner of the Font section of the Home tab; click on the Format dropdown in the Cells section of the Home tab and then select Format Cells; or type Control+1 (the fastest option and the one I always use).
However, there’s an even faster way to produce strikethrough. Select the text (or the cell) you want to strikethrough, and then type Control+5. You can also use that shortcut to remove strikethrough. Handy! Note this doesn’t work in Word; if you want a strikethrough shortcut there, you’ll have to set one up yourself.
For more handy Excel keyboard wizardy, check out our roundup of the most useful Excel keyboard shortcuts.
Comments
5 responses to “Use This Keyboard Shortcut For Strikethrough Text In Excel”
Good article Angus, thanks!
There are loads of keyboard shortcuts that work well together on http://XLCalibre.com
CTRL+1 is a great one as it brings up lots of formatting options that can’t be found with other shortcuts.
Or you could just use control+5 (excel 2007 and higher only)
Thanks ! For french Excel (azerty’s keyboard) the shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+5
What might prevent this from working? I have one cell that allows me to strikethrough one word in a sentence, but another cell in a different tab that won’t allow it (whole font section on ribbon is grayed out). I tried format painter, but it still won’t let me modify any of the font options.
working
Thank you for Ctrl+F5. Made my life SO much easier working on this spreadsheet!
I guess the shortcut changes depending on the language version of excel software.
For italian excel it works CTRL+B
(I have a french keyboard… but CTRL+SHIFT+5 doesn’t work)