Years ago, when I was novice to excel, I filtered some data in excel and copied. But when I pasted the data into a different sheet for further analysis, I observed I pasted complete set of data instead of just the filtered data. It was some thousands of rows. I was disappointed thinking I have to copy each row of data one by one. My team manager observing me from a corner (May be he was writing some points for my appraisal looking at my behaviour on floor!!) walked up to me and understood my problem. He kept his hand on my shoulder, pressed F5 on keyboard and clicked on “Special…” button when he saw “Go To” dialog box. This is the first time when I saw “Go to Special” dialog box in Excel. Thanks to my boss for showing me this technique and Microsoft for giving this option in Excel. This option in excel we are exploring today.
On a day to day basis, we might come across various scenarios where we want to select a specific set of data in a given large set of data based on various criterions. Go to special gives us that option to select data based on various criterion.
“Go to special” gives us 15 criterion's to select data. I’ll be posting this as a series. In each series, I’ll be exploring one criterion.
Navigation/keyboard shortcut to get to “Go To Special”
Excel 2003 navigation: On toolbar, click on Edit and scroll down to click on “Go To”. See a dialog box like below. Now click on “Special” button highlighted on yellow in the below snapshot to see the “Go To Special” dialog box.
Excel 2007 navigation: On the extreme right-hand side of the ribbon you see Find and Select option and click on it to see “Go To Special” like in the below snapshot. Now click on “Go To Special” to see the dialog box.
Keyboard shortcut in Excel 2003 & 2007: Ctrl+G Alt+S or Press F5 and Alt+S. You will see the dialog box like below. This is the starting point for our exploration.
