Easiest Way to Paste Special Value (MS Excel)

If sometimes you were in situation which requires many time Paste Special value then you end up doing traditional way of Paste Special Value

1. Ctrl + Alt + V >> V >> Enter Okay (or)
2. Alt + E + S >> V >> Enter Okay (or)
3. Alt + H + V + V (or)
4. Right Click + S + V [Right Click either on Mouse (or) keyboard , or using shift + 10 if your keyboard doesn't contain right-click key].

The above ways involve 3 (or) more keystrokes to perform the Paste Special Value function in Microsoft Excel. But What if we can perform the same task with 2 keystrokes by slighting configuring Excel. Let's jump into it.

Usually, most of the people (80%) never bothered to customize their Quick Access Toolbar in Excel (which is the main element of today's article).

Save | Undo | Redo >> which we usually never use and always use shortcuts for performing the above tasks.*

* Some Corporate Users will have a Send Email Icon there to immediately share the current working file and for Microsoft 365 users instead of Save, there will be an Autosave On/ Off option.

So what was the importance of the Quick Access Toolbar, if you are an Excel user who uses Alt shortcuts instead of navigating through Mouse. Then you probably noticed whenever you click Alt you will see 1 | 2 | 3 appearing in the tools available in the Quick Access Toolbar.

Configuring Quick Access Toolbar for Paste Special Value function:

1. Alt + F + T (or) File > Options
2. Select Quick Access Toolbar in the side menu
3. Choose Commands from > All Commands >> Scroll for alphabet P >> You will see the below options in

4. Out of this Select the highlighted options and add them to Quick Access Toolbar and customize them to bring the same to First like the below picture.

You would either keep the default options or remove them (up to you).

The purpose of aligning it to the first items in the row is for the will be seen in the next image.

So now Shortcut for Paste Special value will be Alt + 1 (2 keystrokes)

Purpose of the above three Options:

1. Paste Value >> will do the function of Paste Special Value
2. Paste Value and Source Formatting >> this will paste the value as well as formatting (instead of first pasting values and then again clicking Ctrl + Alt + V >> T >> Okay)
3. Paste Formatting >> 1st if values copied from Excel acts as Format Painter; 2nd if Values are copied from a source other than Excel (Like Word, Powerpoint, Outlook or web) act as Ctrl + Alt + V.

Everything is Simple, if you keep it as simple as possible - Aswin Sivakumar