Excel – How to assign a new keyboard shortcut in Excel 2010

I also thought that a shortcut where you have to press three keys at once was too difficult!

My solution was also in AutoHotKey. First you set the title match mode to RegEx because then you can match the titles through a regular expression. Put the following near the top of your script:

SetTitleMatchMode RegEx

And here is the shortcut which should only work in Outlook 2010 (note that I am using Control + Shift + 9):

#IfWinActive Inbox.*Microsoft Outlook
a:: SendInput ^+9
#IfWinActive

For Outlook 2013, the regex needs to be modified slightly:

#IfWinActive Inbox.*Outlook
a:: SendInput ^+9
#IfWinActive

There are 3 different kinds of keyboard shortcuts I know of:

1. Ones like Ctrl-C for Copy
2. Ones like Alt-E-S-V for Edit > Paste Special > Values
3. A shortcut key combo you assign to your own macro

With # 1 I think only Word allows you to change these, e.g., you can change the shortcut for Bold from Ctrl-B to something else. I don't think Excel has ever allowed you to do this. Of course you can write a macro in Excel that changes the Bold property and then assign a keyboard shortcut to it, but that really falls under #3 above.

You use to be able to do #2 in Excel by going into Tools > Customize and then changing the location of the ampersand. For example you could change the name of the Edit menu from &Edit to &Zdit and the shortcut sequence in #2 above would be changed to Alt-Z-S-V. The only way I know to do this now would be to change the toolbar name in VBA (the old toolbars, File, Edit, etc. still exist behind the scenes in Excel 2007 and 2010 and can be accessed via code).

With #3 it's still the same as it was in earlier versions, just go into the Macro dialog and change the shortcut in Options. You only have the choice of Ctrl and one key, I believe. With VBA you can actually create longer combos like Ctrl-Shft-N (one of my favorites).

I hope that helps.