How to use fill color shortcut for Excel

Fill color in Microsoft Excel refers to the background color of cells. It can be used to highlight cells for better readability, categorize data, or simply for aesthetic purposes. It helps to visually organize and highlight important information in a sheet. You can use fill color to make certain cells stand out or to group related data for better organization.

In today’s tutorial, we’re going to learn a quick way to fill color to our cells by using a shortcut key which will help us save time while working on an Excel worksheet. Following dataset above contains information about names, dates, region, items and no. of items they sell. Let’s take the following dataset as an example.

We’ll learn how to use shortcut key to highlight any cell e.g., we’re going to highlight name of seller in cell C2 by using the shortcut key of fill color.

Method 1 – Shortcut key for format cells fill color option

Step 1 – Highlighting cell by using shortcut key for fill color

• Select the cells you want to fill with color.
• Press Ctrl + 1 on your keyboard.
• Go to the “Fill” tab in the “Format Cells” dialog box.
• Choose the desired color from the “Background Color” section.
• Click “OK” to apply the fill color.

Method 2 – Shortcut key for fill color palette drop down

Step 1 – Highlighting cell by using shortcut key for fill color

• Press Ctrl + H + H on your keyboard.
• Then, a drop-down color palette will appear showing different colors.
• After that, you can choose any color from there and highlight your cell by clicking on that color. 
• Now, your cell will be highlighted by the background color you’ve chosen.