Copy and paste visible cells only (not ones you've hidden) - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

- All right, I think my data's ready to copy, paste. Got my columns and rows hidden. (instructor gaping) My hidden cells, how'd you get here? Let's learn how to copy and paste our visible cells only. (fingers snapping) Here we're going to learn how to paste visible cells only. And first, I'm going to walk you through a super common mistake that I see people make and this is when you highlight particular cells and then try to copy, paste them. You'll see what happens. So in this example here, we have our raw data in columns A through D. We have the items, the order amounts, the order date and the sales amount. And here on our order report, as you can see, we only have field for item and sale amount, so we don't need columns B and C. So what we can do to hide columns B and C is we can click on the column letter heading of the first column we want to hide, hold down our Shift key and click on the next heading and that is how we can quickly highlight B and C. And now to hide them, you can either right click on those highlighted columns and click on hide or my favorite shortcut is Control and the zero key on your keyboard. And that will go ahead and hide those two columns. Now, this is where the common mistake comes in. You might be like all right, all right, we got the item and the sale amount. Matches the order report. Item in the sale amount. Let's go in here, let's highlight this data and Control + C or right click and copy it and then let's click into cell F4 and do Control + V or right click, paste it. And oh no, as you can see, it took our hidden columns there and it actually pasted them into our cells. So what we can do here to avoid this, I'm going to do Control + Z on my keyboard to undo and this is where we get fancy. So I'm going to highlight our data here from A4 through D13 with our columns hidden there already in B and C, and now we're going to navigate on our home ribbon to the Find & Select button. And here we're going to select the Go To Special option or the shortcut on your keyboard is Control + G. And here we are going to select the option that says visible cells only or the shortcut for this on your keyboard is the letter y. And when we click Enter or OK, it will copy in that selection and now here's the trick, without clicking anywhere else or it will unselect all of what we just selected, if we do Control + C on our keyboard or right click, copy, as you can see now, it kind of looks like there's two different pieces highlighted there, right? From column A to column D. Got those little dancing ants, the green lines around there going up against each other, showing that there's two different pieces here. And now with that copied, we're going to click into cell F4 and do Control + V or right click, paste, and now those two will paste in nicely for us. And if you'd like to reformat, you can go ahead and highlight our table and come over to the borders option on the home menu and click back those thick outside borders and there we have our data nicely pasted into our order report. So this is a great one to remember. If you are going through your data and there's certain items that you don't need, whether they're columns or rows, and you want to copy that data and move it somewhere else, it's a smart idea to hide whatever you need and then go to that visible cells only option and copy and paste from there.