The NEW Keyboard Shortcut for Pasting in Excel

I can confirm that the new Ctrl + Shift + V shortcut is indeed a timesaver, according to my very scientific test.

In case you didn’t know, we can now paste values into cells while preserving existing formatting — with our keyboards.

Previously, this was only possible using the right-click menu or VBA, but it’s now come to Excel for Microsoft 365. There is a caveat, though — it’s only available for Office Insiders on the Beta Channel.

I required consistency for both tests, so I ensured the starting active cell was A3 and the cursor position was in the middle of A6. I then pressed Ctrl + C to copy the value in A3.

At this point, the difference kicked in.

For the menu method, I right-clicked on A6 and selected Values from the Paste Options section to dump the unformatted text.

With the other, I left-clicked on A6 and hastily sorted my fingers out to press Ctrl + Shift + V.

Boom! It saved me 0.54 seconds.

I did all this while recording at 60fps. I trimmed the videos, so only the precise point I pressed Ctrl + C to when the value loaded was timed.