Jon @ Peltiertech has taken a critical look at the partition charts suggested yesterday. You can read his review of the partition charts here. One of the commenters on his site said,
Jon, the partition chart is not that bad. It just needs to be defragmented… 🙂
So I de-fragmented my partition chart, this time it no longer provides any spatial trend cues or anything, instead its a cool little replacement for a pie chart, more so when you have just 3-4 pies and got bored of looking at pies.
Here is how in just 3 steps you can do this type of de-fragmented partition chart 😉
1. First create a grid where the chart can appear
This is the easy step, select a range of cells (preferably in multiples of 100, I took 300 cells, spaced over 25 columns, 12 rows) and adjust the row-height and column-width till the range looks fine enough. Take a look at this one on the right.
2. Now set the Conditional Format over the range
Lets say you want to show 3 pies, one for 30%, another for 48% and the last one for 32% (well, just kidding, you can only 110% of your work, not 110% of your pies) so 22%. The conditional formatting formulas can look like this:
Your formulas should look like this:
if cell's row-number * width + column-number is with in pie-1's range, turn the cell on to color-1
else if cell's rownumber * width + column-number is with in pie-2's range, turn the cell on to color-2
else turn the color-3 on
3. Remember to trash your pie charts
Well, not really, save the good old pies. There is no step 3. So I saved you … umm… 33% of work. So why dont you leave a comment and tell me what you think about this ?
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.