Alt E S on Mac: Paste Special in Excel for Mac
Short answer: in Excel for Mac, ⌃⌘V (Control-Command-V) opens Paste Special. If AltES is in your fingers from Windows, RibbonBridge makes ⌥ES work on the Mac too.
What Alt E S does
AltES is a leftover from Excel 2003's menus: Edit ▸ Paste Special. The menus are long gone, but Excel for Windows still accepts the sequence, and a generation of finance and consulting people learned Excel on it. It opens the Paste Special dialog, where you choose what to paste: values, formulas, formats, column widths, or an operation such as multiply.
Paste Special on a Mac
Built into Excel
- ⌃⌘V opens Paste Special.
- Or use the menu bar: Edit ▸ Paste Special…
Excel for Mac's own KeyTips don't know Alt E S: tapping Option and typing E does nothing, because the Edit menu isn't part of the ribbon.
With RibbonBridge
RibbonBridge adds the classic sequences back. Copy something, tap ⌥ and type ES: the Paste Special dialog opens, just like on Windows. For the most common case, pasting values, there's an even faster route: ⌥HVV pastes values directly, without the dialog.
| On Mac | What it does | Windows |
|---|---|---|
| ⌥ES | Paste Special… | Alt E S |
| ⌥ED | Delete… (cells, rows, columns) | Alt E D |
| ⌥IR / C | Insert rows / columns | Alt I R / C |
| ⌥OCA | AutoFit column | Alt O C A |
| ⌥DFF | Filter on / off | Alt D F F |
| ⌥DP | PivotTable… | Alt D P |
Get Alt E S back on your Mac. RibbonBridge is a small Mac app for Excel: 7 days free with just your email, then €15 once.
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