List Of Available Letters For Use as VB Macro Shortcuts

Hello @Eric Fitzgerald

To answer your question directly: there is no official list of "available" versus "unavailable" letters. In general, you can assign a single letter (A-Z), and Excel will combine it with Command+Option (or just Command).

However, Excel does not indicate in advance which combinations are already assigned to built-in shortcuts. Because many combinations are already reserved by Excel and macOS (for example, Command+C, Command+V, and Command+S), the practical approach is to choose a less commonly used letter.

Here are a couple of ways to handle this on a Mac:

• Add the Shift Key: Hold down the Shift key when assigning your letter (making it uppercase). This creates a Command+Option+Shift+Letter shortcut, which is much less likely to conflict with standard built-in commands. https://support.microsoft.com/en-US/Excel/run-a-macro-in-excel
• Use Application.OnKey: If you need more control over shortcut assignments, you can use VBA's Application.OnKey method to map a wider range of key combinations. Just keep in mind that support for certain key combinations can differ slightly on Mac compared to Windows. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/excel.application.onkey

Hope this helps.

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Thank you Gabriel for taking the time to respond. I've been an Excel user since the '80s. I only get into editing macros occasionally. So for those who are like me that have encountered this time-wasting frustration, here is the list of keys that will take a macro in the Mac OS:

e, t, y, p, s, g, j, k, l, z, x, v, b, n

These keys will not:

q, w, r, u, i, o, a, d, f, h, c, m

Hopefully this will save someone else the seeming eternity that I have spent trying to figure this out without finally realizing that you need this list on those infrequent projects that require more than a few VB macros.

It seems to me that Microsoft might incorporate this into the documentation and save future users the hassle.

Sincerely,

Eric