KEY POINTS
Microsoft Excel is helpful for many things but Excel shortcut keys can save you incredible amounts of time. This post explores the Excel F9 shortcut key.
Learn how to use the F9 Excel shortcut key to display the concatenated version of the selected range.
The F9 Excel shortcut key can be used to create a text string to generate a reporting filter for your business intelligence reporting software.
How to Use the Excel F9 Shortcut Key
(1) Determine the cell range that you would like to create a concatenated text string for.
(2) Once you've determined which cell range you'd like to select, in a cell outside of the range you are going to select, type the "=" symbol and select the cell range. If you've named your cell range, you can use the "=" symbol then the name of the range. Be sure to stay in the cell after you've selected your range.
(3) Once input your formula in the cell, you'll then want to hit the F9 key. This will display in the cell a concatenated text string of all of the values in your range as shown below.
(4) From the formula bar, you can then remove the "=" symbol as well as the parentheses then hit enter from the formula bar.
(5) Now that you've hit enter, you'll notice that the value in your cell is the list of values from your range with each value separated by a semicolon ";". If your business intelligence reporting software requires a semicolon to create a filter, this will work perfectly. You can use the Ctrl + F shortcut key to do a find and replace on the semicolon to replace the value separator to whatever is required by your software (i.e. some software requires a comma "," others require only spaces).
The F9 Excel shortcut key can be used to be build a text string for whatever your requirements may be. This shortcut key can save you hours if you have a large amount of data that you need to create a filter for from your BI software.
Let me know in the comments what you've used the F9 shorcut key for!