Working in the grid

The grid is built for keyboard work, the way a spreadsheet is — click a cell to select it, or press Tab until the table has focus, then do everything else without touching the mouse again.

Getting in and out

Tab into the table and it selects the cell you had selected last — or the first cell, if you haven't picked one yet — and outlines it.
The table is one stop in both directions. Move between cells with the arrow keys; one more Tab leaves the table entirely, and Shift+Tab comes back to the cell you left. The buttons inside the table — the column headers, the row checkboxes, the open-record buttons, the Add row bar — are reached from the selected cell instead of by tabbing through them one at a time.

Moving

Arrow keys move the selected cell one step. Hold Shift with an arrow to extend a range instead of moving.
Up from the first row steps onto the column header row, which the arrow keys walk like any other row. Down comes back to the first row, and Escape returns to the cell you came from.
Down from the last row lands on the Add row bar at the foot of the table, if the table has one. Any arrow key brings you back to the cell you left.
Home moves to the start of the current row; End to its end. Add Ctrl (or Cmd on a Mac) to jump to the very first or very last cell in the table instead.
Page Up / Page Down move a screen's worth of rows at a time.
Ctrl/Cmd+A selects every cell in the table.

Using the buttons in a cell

Space ticks the box in the selected cell — a checkbox column, the same as clicking it.
Enter opens what's in a cell the column won't let you type into: an attachment, for instance. On a column header it sorts the column; where a header has several controls (a drag handle, sorting, a column menu) it moves onto the first of them instead.
Shift+Space moves onto the row's own buttons — the select checkbox and the open-record button, which sit outside the cells the arrow keys reach.
Once you're on a button inside the table, Tab moves between the other buttons on that same line, and Escape hands the keyboard back to the selected cell.

Selecting a range

Click a cell and drag, or hold Shift and use the arrow keys, to select a rectangle of cells. Escape backs out of a selection in two steps: the first press collapses a multi-cell range back down to the one cell you started from; press it again to clear the selection entirely. An arrow key brings the selected cell back where you left it.

Editing a cell

Press Enter or F2 to open the selected cell for editing without disturbing its current value. Or just start typing — the first character you type opens the cell and replaces whatever was in it, the same as typing over a selected cell in a spreadsheet.

While editing:

Enter saves the cell — or just closes it, if nothing changed — and moves the selection down one row. In a date, Enter picks the highlighted day, closes the calendar and moves down with it.
Tab saves the cell the same way and moves right, wrapping to the next row at the end of one; Shift+Tab moves left. That holds in a date and a dropdown too: Tab keeps the choice you made and moves on.
If what you typed isn't a valid email address, a full phone number or a number, Enter keeps the cell open and says what's wrong just under it. Tab, or clicking somewhere else, puts the cell back the way it was and tells you what wasn't saved, so you can keep moving along the row.
A number can be typed the way you'd write it: 1,5 and 1 234,56 are read as French-Canadian decimals, $1,200.50 as twelve hundred dollars and fifty cents. A Number column keeps every decimal you type; a Money column rounds to the cent.
Escape always discards what you typed and leaves the cell exactly as it was — this holds no matter what kind of cell you're editing, including a date or a dropdown where the editor is a small popup rather than a text box.

A cell edit is committed the moment you leave it, on its own — not batched up and saved when you leave the table. That's deliberate: two people working the same table at the same time can edit different cells without either one's change getting overwritten by the other's.

Deleting

Delete or Backspace clears every cell in the current selection.

Copy and paste

Copy and paste work in ranges, the way they do in a spreadsheet, and the values you copy travel correctly to and from Excel or Google Sheets as well as between two GIG tables:

Copy a single cell and paste it onto a larger selection, and it fills the whole selection with that one value.
Copy a block of cells and paste it onto a larger selection, and it repeats to tile the selection.
Copying inside GIG and pasting back into GIG preserves the exact values, rather than round-tripping them through plain text — so pasting a block you just copied from another GIG table lands exactly as it left, with nothing lost to reformatting.

A single paste is capped at 5,000 rows; anything beyond that is dropped from that paste rather than triggering one enormous write.

Undo and redo

Ctrl/Cmd+Z undoes the last change; add Shift to redo. While you're typing — in a cell you're editing, or in a field such as a column's name — it undoes your typing instead, the way it does in any text box.

Large tables

The grid only renders the rows currently in view, so a table of twenty thousand rows scrolls at the same speed as one with twenty.

What isn't answered here yet

Resizing and reordering columns, and grouping rows, aren't covered on this page yet.