I provide you with two methods to accomplish what you want. Unfortunately, both methods do have their own caveats, since Excel does not provide an all-in-one keyboard shortcut for auto-fill. I highly suggest you try both methods and then determine which works best for you. Outside of these two methods, I do not believe you can accomplish what you seek without the use of macros or add-in modules. Should you go the macro route, the AutoFill
method on any Range
object should be all that you need.
Method 1 (alternate, but it works with no mouse interaction)
Another way to accomplish this is to use a combination of the fill-down shortcut and the select all in range. After you enter the data in the cell, press Ctrl+Shift+End to select from the current cell to the end of the range that would be auto-filled. Then, press Ctrl+D to "fill down" into the entire range from the top cell.
Method 2 (my preferred way, one-time mouse interaction)
Once you fill in the cell you want to auto-fill downwards, double-click the bottom right corner as usual. To repeat the "auto-fill down" step, so long as you only enter data and press enter, you can repeat it by pressing Ctrl+Y.
This means that you do need to use the mouse, but only the first time. All subsequent work can be done purely with the keyboard, so long as you only use it to enter data (i.e. you don't use the context menu button to modify anything).
Note that the first method does come with a minor caveat - your view/cursor will move to the bottom of the spreadsheet (which does not happen with the Ctrl+Y method). You can press the Home key to move the cursor back up quickly.
Excel does not offer a direct way to customize this: it is neither a menu command (which would be available to OS X’s system wide shortcuts), nor is it a shortcut configurable via Office’s dedicated Tools → Customize Keyboard… (approximate translation, I’m on a German system) dialog – as you can easily test by calling the dialog and pressing Ctrl+U in the Add Shortcut box (no assigned shortcut will be shown).
You can, however, work around the issue by remapping Cmd+Return to Ctrl+U using Takayama Fumihiko’s KeyRemap4MacBook (which, despite its name, will work on any Mac running OS X 10.4 upwards). You will have to add a private.xml configuration file to KeyRemap4MacBook like documented on the KeyRemap4MacBook site, with its XML content looking like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<item>
<name>Remap "Edit in Cell" in Excel</name>
<appendix>Use Command+Return instead of Ctrl+U</appendix>
<identifier>private.app_excel_commandreturn_to_ctrlu</identifier>
<only>EXCEL</only>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::RETURN, VK_COMMAND, KeyCode::U, ModifierFlag::CONTROL_L</autogen>
</item>
</root>
– this will restrict the remapping to Excel (for a complete list of the keycodes used by KeyRemap4MacBook, see its source code).
Best Answer
Right Click via Keyboard
Spell Check via Keyboard
There are standard shortcuts for the built-in spell checking. Not all applications may have these menu items.