Throughout my career I have worked in analytics at various levels, and every job I've had dealt with data in some capacity. At its basic level, my first job consisted of mind-numbingly repetitive data entry in MS Excel. Thanks to that drudgery, over time I got pretty quick with Excel. I got to a point where I could effortlessly jump around a file and manipulating it to look how I wanted. Every so often someone new would see me work and say something along the lines of, "wow... you're pretty good at that."

The key to the magic is to ditch the mouse, and learn to do everything with just your keyboard.

If you're working with Excel on a daily basis, you're probably doing similar things over and over again. Every time I open a file I usually add filters, format the header row in bold, expand all columns to fit the text, and freeze the top row. On average I probably open about 20 files per day and repeat these steps.

Here is what the steps look like if you're using the mouse.

Total cost of using the mouse: 12 clicks and ~17 seconds. In the grand scheme of things, not so bad. Even if you do these steps 20 times in a day, that's less than 6 minutes of time you're spending to set up the files for easy viewing.

Here's what the same process looks like if just use the keyboard (on Windows).

Total cost of using only the keyboard: 7 keyboard key combinations and ~5 seconds. You're reducing time spent by 70%.

That's all well and good, but saving 70% of 6 minutes isn't that big of a deal. So why go through the trouble? Well, the steps I mention above are just the tip of the iceberg. Basically any formatting or navigating through a spreadsheet that you do on a regular basis can be done using keyboard shortcuts.

Personally, I know only a small handful of these shortcuts. But I use that small handful all the time, to the point where they're built into my muscle memory, and I can format a file in seconds without thinking about it. And that right there is what makes it look like sorcery.

The value of looking like an excel wizard is that it lends you an air of credibility when presenting to bosses or working with colleagues. "Holy crap, Wojtek really knows what he's doing with Excel!" Plus, it's very painful to sit through a meeting watching someone spend minutes slowly scrolling through a file trying to find a particular piece of data.

An additional benefit is that when you really get to know your tools they fall into the background, and you can spend more of your cognitive energy on the task at hand rather than wrestling with the tools. You can find a pretty good tutorial on how to learn these shortcuts on Microsoft's support page.

Here's a bonus tip - on Windows you can use Alt, Tab to jump between the window you're currently in and the last window you were in. This goes along with the theme of using the keyboard as much as you can without having to touch the mouse. If you spend most of your day jumping between different screens this will be much quicker than moving your hand to the mouse, going to the task bar and trying to find the one file you were just on. This is especially handy when you have 100 other things open.

So if you want to build some Excel street cred, an easy way to do it is to keep your hands on the keyboard, and learn the main shortcuts that you'll be using all the time.