With each passing day the amount of information contained in a single spreadsheet, slide, document is growing. Thanks to demanding bosses, clients and colleagues, we are now supposed to provide all the relevant information in as much less space as possible.
This is where micro charting or light weight data exploration has become a rage. The idea of shrinking a chart to fit in side a cell has been catching up with corporates and individuals alike.
In this post, we are going to review 7 of the MS Excel Micro-charting Alternatives so that you have a good idea of finding the right micro charting tool for your purpose.
1. Incell excel charts using REPT() spreadsheet function
Incell charting using REPT() spreadsheet is one of the easiest ways to include some data visualization capabilities to your excel tables without sweat. Click here to learn this technique of drawing incell charts.
Advantages:
- Very easy to implement
- No need to install any VBA or Add-ins
- Suitable for simple data visualizations in tables
Disadvantages:
- You can only make variants of bar charts
- Difficult to format, highlight specific points with out tweaking
- Not suitable for corporate environment where you need lots of visualizations on the tables
2. Incell charts using REPT(), cell formatting and conditional formatting
This technique involves using in-cell charts to prepare the micro chart and then using excel features like cell alignment and conditional formatting to provide additional information, thus making the charts rich. Learn more.
Advantages:
- Moderately easy to implement
- No need for VBA or add-ins
- Suitable for visualizing project plans, sales reports etc.
Disadvantages:
- Conditional formatting has limitation of only 3 conditions / formats
- Not suitable for complex visualizations
3. Resizing regular excel charts to fit inside a cell
By resizing the normal excel charts and removing all the chart labels, axis, background etc. we can get a micro chart effect with all the goodness of regular excel charts.
Advantages:
- Since most of us familiar with regular excel charts, this is an easy to implement technique
- All the chart types are available for micro charting, so you can create spark lines, pie charts, stacked bars etc.
- Easy to format, highlight charts
Disadvantages:
- Not all charts scale elegantly
- Needs a lot of formatting to remove all the chart labels etc.
- Not suitable if you have lots of charts to prepare as maintaining that many charts is painful
4. Using custom fonts / ding bats to create micro charts
Since we can insert any character in to a cell using formula, by installing a custom bar chart / pie font in our computer we can create incell graphs in excel with ease. Click here to see example pie chart, line chart.
Advantages:
- Easy to implement
- Reduces lots of chart maintenance / creation work because of the fonts
- Suitable for simple visualizations
Disadvantages:
- Not shareable since other person need to have the font installed before seeing the spreadsheet
- Not for everyone, since installing fonts is often not possible on office computers
- Not suitable for complex visualizations / dashboards
5. Using Spark lines UDF from Daily dose of excel
If you are planning to get simple spark lines on your spreadsheet cells then Daily dose of Excel’s sparklines UDF can be handy for you. This technique takes a set of numeric values as input and draws a line in the output cell based on the input.
Advantages:
- Moderately easy to implement
- Suitable for instant spark lines
- Makes a good addition to your sales report, project plans etc.
Disadvantages:
- You need to install the User Defined VBA Function in order to get this work
- When sharing the work book with others, they need to enable UDFs / VBA to make this work
- Suitable only when you want spark lines
6. Using a free excel micro charting tool like Spark lines for Excel by Fabrice
Spark lines for Excel is an excellent alternative to make your reports / dashboards look truly professional without spending a penny. This is set of VBA UDFs defined to draw micro bar charts, line charts, bullet charts, reverse bullet charts, Pareto charts, Scale-lines, variance charts and cascade charts. The latest version is available for download on sourceforge.
Advantages:
- Totally free with truly world class micro charting in excel options
- Easy to implement if you know how to install UDFs / excel add-ins
- Suitable for enterprise class dashboards, sales reports
Disadvantages:
- Since this is a free / open source version, any implementation issues will have to be solved by you
- Requires installing UDFs on others computer or enabling VBA before you can share this with them
7. Commercial alternatives like Bonavista micro charts
Of course if you are a heavy user of micro charts and you (your company) needs a totally professional solution for your dashboards then you may want to consider one of the commercial alternatives like Bonavista micro charts.
Since they advertise on my site through Google ads, I am not planning to talk about this any further. But if you have any questions, drop a comment. Andreas, who represents both Xlcubed and Bonavista systems is a frequent commenter here and he would be happy to answer your questions.
So, which one should I use?
If you want a simple incell chart, use one of the REPT() based techniques.
and If you want a full fledged micro charts for you reports / dashboards then start with free excel spark lines and then if needed migrate to one of the commercial alternatives.
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.