As a rule we prefer to navigate through a big spreadsheet using the CTRL and arrow buttons. If you are not aware of it, if you click on the first cell in a range, and click CTRL and the right arrow button, the cell will jump to the last cell with something in it (to see what we mean watch the video clip on navigating in excel).
An alternate way is to use the CTRL- END- arrow buttons. We don’t like this method and a recent assignment re enforced why. We were assisting in the build of a big financial model and to make the model more manageable, the columns from SL were hidden. In theory the consistent formula should have all stopped at this column. However, every time we got the model back it had doubled in size and was becoming very slow.
We discovered that the cause was from using the CTRL- END- arrow method. In this case the formula were copied onto all the columns up to column XFD (i.e. not stopping at column SL even though that is were the formula stop). This wouldn’t happened if CTRL and Arrow were used as it would stop at SL.