or .. veni vidi viblogged
well, after a brief globe trotting to few places here and there, I had to go to where literally every other Indian IT employee goes. America. After spending most of my first 4 days here indoors I guess I am both qualified and bored enough to write this post. And after spending good amount of weekend time clicking remote or flicking matrimonials or licking your plate, I am sure you are also eager to read this post while trying to focus on work. So without further ….
My travel had nothing exciting to write home about, unless you want to call watching-6-movies – getting-served-by-male-air-hostesses – and-loosing-one-of-your-suitcases-in-transit exciting. Anyways what is really the matter with muscular and cold looking male air hostesses? Have I formed stereotypes watching too much of those red skirted kingfisher ladies or it is how they work in this part of the world? well .. whatever
So I walk out of the Columbus intl. airport feeling anorexic from all the in flight consumables and hail a cab. As I try to explain the driver where I wanted to go, I quickly learned that he knows nothing except driving. I mean not even reading or writing. I guess this is what us consultants call verticalization. So while I spell letter by letter and point it on the GPS unit our man was able to configure the address and get the directions. He is a sweet man though.
The first cultural shock came in a matter of 23 seconds. I have quickly learned that I have reached US on a super extra long weekend called thanksgiving weekend. Well, I couldn’t be more thankful though. I was in no mood to work after what seemed like a zillion hours of listening to “stow your brain in the overhead compartment, buckle your belt to the seat and restore your feet from the seat in front of you”. So I spent rest of my day wondering what my wife has packed in the other suitcase that went missing in the transit. I realized it contained important life saving stuff like my camera, bathing soap, bed sheet, pillow and eatables.
Next morning my room-mate suggested that we go get some milk from the near by pharmacy. So we walked across the street and entered in to a place that looked almost like half the size of Chennai central railway station. You could buy Christmas trees, digital cameras, bedsheets apart from medicines there. I must tell you this, here everything that is in liquid form (can be liquified) is measured in gallons, including but not limited to espresso shots, coke or tequila.
Rest of my 4 days here involved more of walking across the street to buy some coffee or wearing too many clothes and watching some Simpson’s while sitting on the couch. I guess that part matches pretty much with the life in India, except that I still miss my suitcase.
A last tip to anyone curious enough to read till here: a gallon actually means 3.7 ltrs but feels like a whole lot of coffee that an entire state of Goa can drink in a morning.
PS: Image belongs to http://www.commercialrealtygroup.com
8 Responses to “Top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel Charts”
As far as I remember (checked, again, 2 minutes ago) in my "Excel 2013" in order to select various chart elements I need to use the Arrow keys and not the TAB key.
Practically, the TAB key does nothing (within a Chart).
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Michael (Micky) Avidan
Thanks for pointing this out. This is how I remember it too, but when I was recording the video yesterday, only TAB key worked. MS must have changed the keys in Excel 2016. I have edited the post to include both keys.
The key navigation on charts is different in 2016.
TAB cycles through a layer of objects (SHIFT+TAB cycles backwards)
ENTER move down a layer
ESC moves up a layer
So on a column chart with title/legend/data labels if you select the plotarea the TAB will go through Title > Legend > Plotarea.
ENTER at plotarea will then select Vertical axis. Tab will take you through
Horizontal axis > gridlines > Series > Horizontal Axis.
ENTER with series selected will then allow you to TAB through individual data points and data labels.
If you ENTER on datalabels you can TAB through each data label.
ALT + F1 : to create default chart
ALT+E S T = CTRL + ALT + V, T : I find that easier to remember
I second what Michael already said about TAB and arrow keys. I can't help but think if this is related to the "," or ";" as separator. I prefer to use the chart tools - layout- drop down box, anyway.
Got to be F11 for instant charting. Highlight your data , hit F11 and voila! ?
Ctrl+1 is the most important chart shortcut. In fact, it works for any Excel object: whatever is selected, Ctrl+1 opens the task pane or dialog to format that object.
Somewhere along the line, maybe when Excel 2016 came out, the arrow keys stopped working to cycle through the elements of a chart. But what works is holding Ctrl while clicking the arrow keys. I haven't gotten used to the Tab and other keys, but as long as Ctrl+Arrow works, I'm good.
And F4 used to be so helpful when formatting a lot of charts. But since Excel 2007 came out, it has been mostly useless. It used to remember a whole set of changes at once, so I get that the newer modeless dialogs make that impractical. But now it only seems to work with formatting of lines and borders, and maybe fills. I find myself writing a lot of VBA one-liners in the Immediate Window to handle these tedious formatting tasks.
after clicking on a chart, is there a shortcut key to copy it?
Thank you for the Alt E S T - tip. This is more than a time saver. Because of dynamic charts or de-activated external references to data when you make the charts, you often have empty charts that are otherwise impossible to format. So this shortcut helps adressing that. I will work with it more and see if there remain some obstacles.