Keyboard Shortcuts for Inserting Rows

When Tim is working on a worksheet, he often needs to insert rows above whatever cell he has selected. He wonders if there is a keyboard shortcut to insert a new row above and, perhaps, a related shortcut to insert a row below.

Using the keyboard to insert rows above the current row is easy, and there are a couple of ways to do it. Longtime users of Excel will know that you can press Alt+I and then press the R key. This inserts a row directly above whatever cell you have currently selected. I mention longtime users of Excel because this key sequence was used way back, before the ribbon interface was introduced in Excel 2007. The sequence is maintained by Microsoft even in the latest versions of the program for compatibility reasons.

A newer approach is to first select the current row of cells (you can press Shift+Spacebar to do that) and then press Ctrl++ (that's the Ctrl key plus the + key). You can use the plus key on the numeric keypad, or you can include Shift in the sequence to get to the plus key on the regular keyboard. Either way, a full row is inserted above the row you selected to begin with.

Note that these shortcuts work a bit differently if you are working within a defined table. In that case, you don't need to select the current row first—pressing Ctrl++ will add a row above the current row in the table. If you want to affect a both the table and the cells outside the table, then you'll need to press Shift+Spacebar twice (first to select the row in the table and second to select the worksheet row outside the table) before using the insert row shortcut.

Inserting a row below the current one is a different story—Excel doesn't provide a shortcut for that. This means you have two possible workarounds. First, you can simply move down a row and then use one of the techniques already described. Second, you could create a macro to insert a row below:

Sub InsertRowBelow()
    Cells(ActiveCell.Row + 1, 1).EntireRow.Insert
End Sub

Note that the macro uses the .Insert method to add the entire row, but it is applied to the row below where the active cell is located. Thus, this single-line macro effectively does exactly what the first workaround does—moves down a row and inserts above.

If you create such a macro, you can assign it to a shortcut key so you then have your own shortcut for inserting a row below the current one.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (8072) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365.