How to undo and redo changes in Excel

Often, you'll make some sort of change to a worksheet and need to undo it. Excel has a powerful system for tracking changes so that they can be reversed when needed. It's called undo and redo.

Let's take a look.

As you make changes to your worksheet, Excel tracks these changes in a way that they can be reversed if needed using the Undo command.

For example, if you've made a list, and you decide you don't want the last value you typed, you can just click the undo button, and Excel will step back in time before that change was made.

If you click the Undo button again, you'll step back one more step.

If you decide that you do want the changes after all, you can click the Redo button, next to the Undo button. Each time you click Redo, Excel brings back another change.

Both Undo and Redo have keyboard shortcuts that are worth remembering. Control Z for Undo and Control Y for Redo. Using these shortcuts, we can Undo and Redo the same changes again.

Excel actually keeps track of your last 100 actions, and monitors most things you do in a worksheet, including edits, formatting, copy and paste, inserts, and  more. Excel also labels each change with a simple description.

Let's make some more changes to see how this works.

As before, we can step backwards and forwards through the changes. Note that when we hover over the undo and redo buttons, we get a short description of each change.

What's more, if you click the arrow next to the undo and redo buttons, you'll  see a list of all changes that have been tracked. You can use this menu to step backwards and forwards through more than one action at a time.

For example, we can easily undo the last 10 actions.

Then, we can Redo the last 10 actions.

Note that Excel's history of changes is not cleared when you save a workbook. Tracked changes are only cleared when you close a workbook.