While trying to spell check one my sheets I have learned this cool trick to fetch real time stock quotes without any webqueries or vba or anything.
First enter the stock code in a cell (this works for US stocks only), for eg. AAPL for Apple, MSFT for Microsoft etc. Then ALT+CLICK on that cell, this will open “Research task pane” on the right side of the screen. The screen should look something like this:
Dont worry if you dont see the stock quote, that could be because your research type is set to either “all research books” or “thesaurus”, just click the drop-down and select “MSN Money Stock Quotes” – 2nd option from last (Excel remembers your selection, so next time you alt+click on a company code it automatically shows the stock quote) Once the quote is displayed in the research task pane, just click the “insert price” button to get the quote inserted in to your worksheet. Simple eh?
Now, if you want to track a bunch of company quotes, just create a simple macro to do the alt+click on each of the company code cells and you have a real time quote tracking terminal built into your excel sheet. Just go wild 😀
Bonus tip: If you want a company profile data for a particular stock (like company address, phone number, exchange codes, last year revenue) select the “Thomas Gale company profiles” instead.
Please note that both this options work Excel 2003 and above.
Also read: Create stock / mutual fund portfolio tracker in excel using web lookup queries
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).
----------------------------
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.