

With a bit of help from a third-party program, though, you can achieve the same end result-make F2 edit the current cell in Excel (2004 or 2008) on the Mac. Unfortunately, you won’t find the “edit this cell” command listed in Excel’s keyboard customization section, so there’s no apparent way to change the shortcut. You’ll probably find quite a few that you didn’t know about.) After many years of using a PC in my prior job, I found the Control-U shortcut not only hard to remember, but harder to type. (If you’d like to see all of Excel’s keyboard shortcuts, open Help -> Excel Help, then type keyboard shortcuts in the search box, and then select Excel Keyboard Shortcuts in the results box.

On the Mac, the equivalent keyboard shortcut is Control-U, as F2 is assigned to cut the contents of the current cell. On the PC, you can edit the current cell in place by simply pressing F2. (You could do it the other way around, of course, setting your PC up to match your Mac.) This works well for most shortcuts, but there’s one in particular that I use all the time that’s immune to this solution: the keyboard shortcut for ‘edit this cell.’ Using the View -> Customize Toolbars & Menus menu item (in Excel 2008 View -> Toolbars -> Customize Toolbars/Menus in Excel 2004), you can change the shortcuts on your Mac to match those on your PC. Obviously what the appearance of Office looks like will depend on what the Mac default appearance theme is set to, and if the computer only supports the Light mode Mac theme then Office will look that way, whereas if the MacOS version is new enough and Office is updated to a recent version, the Office suite apps will respect the Dark Mode theme in Mac OS if that is in use. If you use Excel on both the Mac and the PC, you’re probably aware that there are numerous differences between the two platforms’ keyboard shortcuts.
