Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Careful! That was *Alt*+F11 !

Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Careful! That was *Alt*+F11 !

From your active workbook, a fast and easy way to get into the Visual Basic Editor is to press Alt+F11 on your keyboard. You can do this from any worksheet.

Careful, that was *Alt*+F11! The Ctrl key is commonly used in conjunction with other keys for keyboard shortcuts. By force of habit, you might mistakenly press Ctrl+F11 instead of Alt+F11 when attempting to go to the VBE.

Pressing Ctrl+F11 has a curious result. You won’t be taken to the VBE, but instead you will have created and find yourself on an outdated type of sheet called a macro sheet, with the strange tab name of Macro1. What’s up with that?

Prior to Excel version 97, macros were stored on macro sheets, which can still be created, though they have no practical use with today’s Excel, and they no longer hold any programming code. It’s OK to just delete the macro sheet if you create one, and take another stab at the Alt key with F11 to get into the VBE.



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2 comments on “Tom’s Tutorials For Excel: Careful! That was *Alt*+F11 !
  1. Billy says:

    What have I done in excel if I press ‘home’ on my laptop and get a new chart instead of going to the beginning of the line?

    • Tom Urtis says:

      That’s a new one. If you are sure you pressed the Home key and nothing else was selected while you did that, and if there is no programming code involved whatsoever, then I cannot even guess.

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