Using KM to fix Mac Excel

I was talking to a co-worker about this over lunch and he said the worst one he's run into was Excel on the Mac. He thought it was ridiculous that Microsoft would think Ctrl-U was even close to hitting the F2 key that Windows users use.1 I sat there for a second and said I always use F2 key when I edit cells in Excel. We argued for about 10 minutes and finally made a bet on whether I was right or not.

We sat down at my desk and started Excel, opened a file and went to edit a cell. Just as I was about to hit F2 I remembered I had set up a Keyboard Maestro macro to remap F2 2 key to Ctrl-U. I hit F2 and sure enough, I was in edit mode for the cell.

My buddy's jaw dropped and immediately asked how I had remapped the keyboard for just Excel to do that. I had to sheepishly admit that it wasn't that complicated.

He argued that I didn't win the bet because I forgot to mention I was using another program to remap the key. We called it draw because he was just happy to not have to use the horrendous Ctrl-U key combo. One of the few things I think are messed up on a Mac is how companies think they need to re-invent the wheel with keyboard shortcuts.


  1. Have ever tried to hit that key combo... terrible. 

  2. You have to enable 'Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard keys' in Keyboard settings. 

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