Switching Sheets: Ctrl+PageUp and PageDown

A workbook with twelve monthly sheets, or dozens of sheets organized by project, calls for keyboard navigation — clicking the small tabs at the bottom gets slow once there are a lot of them, and it's easy to miss the right one. The Ctrl+PageUp and Ctrl+PageDown combo switches between sheets without ever letting go of the keyboard to reach for the mouse.

A typical scenario

Kateřina has a yearly workbook with twelve sheets, one per month, and when checking numbers she needs to jump quickly between January and December to compare how things have trended. Clicking tabs, she'd have to find the right one each time among twelve similarly named sheets — and in a wider workbook, some tabs get hidden and need scrolling with the little arrows in the bottom-left corner first.

With Ctrl+PageDown and Ctrl+PageUp, she moves through the sheets one after another without touching the mouse — her hands stay on the keyboard, and switching between months is a single keypress.

How to do it

1. Press Ctrl + PageDown to move to the next sheet, to the right of the current one.
2. Press Ctrl + PageUp to move to the previous sheet, to the left.
3. The shortcut switches sheets in the order they're arranged in the workbook — if you need to change that order, drag a sheet tab to a new spot with the mouse.
4. Right-clicking the arrows to the left of the sheet tabs (or any tab) opens a list of every sheet in the workbook — useful for workbooks with more sheets than fit on screen, where you'd otherwise have to switch through them one at a time.
5. To jump straight to a specific, distant sheet, that list is faster than repeatedly pressing Ctrl+PageDown or PageUp sheet by sheet.

The best tools

• The built-in Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown shortcut (Excel) — works in every version, nothing to configure.
• The same Ctrl+PageUp/PageDown combo also switches tabs in most web browsers — a habit that comes in handy outside Excel too.
• Color-coding sheet tabs (right-click a tab → Tab Color) — not a keyboard shortcut, but paired with fast switching it makes navigating a larger workbook easier, since a color tells you at a glance where you are.

What you get out of it

• Time: a few seconds per switch, but in workbooks where you jump between sheets dozens of times a day, that's real minutes.
• Smoother work: your hands stay on the keyboard, so switching sheets doesn't interrupt typing or working with formulas.
• Lower risk of a mistake: clicking the wrong tab among similarly named sheets (January, February…) can't happen with the shortcut.

Pro tip

To jump straight to the first or last sheet in a long workbook, it's faster to open the sheet list by right-clicking the arrows in the bottom-left corner and picking it directly, rather than pressing Ctrl+PageDown ten times in a row.