When I was in school we had a maths teacher named BVN. He used to teach advanced math (like trigonometry, calculus) for class 7 onwards. We used to fear him a lot because he is the strictest of them all. Finally when I got to seventh I met him as a teacher. And boy, he is one of the persons to change my life. He inspired me learn math like no other, he is the one who showed me how to work with computers (with those big 5¼ floppy disks and BASIC). I liked him so much that during my tenth class I even played his role during teacher’s day (It is the birthday of the second President of India, academic philosopher Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan. It is considered a “celebration” day, on this day, the responsibility of teaching is taken up by the senior students as an appreciation for their teachers. more)
I met many more wonderful teachers during rest of my life, Prof. Kuldeep and Prof. Ram Kumar at IIM Indore, Prof. Seetharamaiah during my engineering days and of course my grand mother, who is probably my very first teacher in life and school. People to whom I am always thankful.
One excellent quality all these people share is, they all taught me to be passionate. They all told me to give everything for stuff I care about. They told me to question. And that is the most valuable lesson any teacher can impart on you.
I couldn’t help but remembering all those wonderful teachers in my life when I saw the Randy Pausch‘s the last lecture. He is a professor at CMU famous for his contributions to Virtual Reality and HCI. When he learned about his critical health condition due to pancreatic cancer, he chose to deliver “last lecture”, a talk to impart his life’s learnings to students and inspire them.
If you haven’t seen this lecture, please watch it. It is really inspirational.
Who are the most inspirational teachers in your life?
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.