I think that the keyboard shortcuts are very helpful in many ways. Usually it takes time to learn every shortcut, but once you know most of them you no longer have to go to the drop down menu to look for functions.
Most shortcuts start with the ctrl button and then followed by the letter of the operation that you are about to do. For example to open the create table box you press ctrl+T which brings down that dialog box. Another example is ctrl+A selects the entire worksheet. That is very helpful when you want to use a certain theme for the entire sheet.
