In How Many Links are Too Many Links, O’Reilly radar shows us this unfortunate bubble chart. (click on the image to see a bigger version)
I say unfortunate for the lack of a better word without sounding harsh.
Just in case you are wondering what that chart is trying to tell (which is perfectly fine)
Nick Bilton, who constructed this chart, got curious and went to the top 98 websites in the world and found out how many links they have on their home page. Then he used charting tools like processing to create the bathing bubbles you are seeing aside.
The conclusion ?
Too many bubbles can drown you. And also, top web sites have lots and lots of links on their home pages.
But seriously, apart from looking really pretty, does this chart actually provide that conclusion?
I think Nick and the O’Reilly radar team could have much better with a simpler and fortunate chart selection.
A histogram of # of links on popular home pages
like the one below would have been very easy to read and get the point.
I showed some dummy data in the histogram, but when you create 2 histograms, one for popular sites (ranked below 5000) and one for not-so-popular sites (>5000) you can easily make the point and use the bubbles for a warm bath.
A better alternative is to show a scatter chart
with site rank on one axis and # of links on home page on another axis, that way a conclusion like Top Sites Links More can be easily established.
Even a bar chart with number of links on each home page
could have been better than umpteen bubbles
You could easily add a bar with “avg. number of links on non-popular sites” to contrast the linking behaviour of large sites wrt small sites.
But alas, we are treated to an unfortunate bubble chart that does nothing but look pretty (and ridiculously large)
What do you think ? How many bubbles are too many ?
Recommended Reading on Bubble Charts: Travel Site Search Patterns in Bubbles, Good Bubble Chart about the Bust. Olympic Medals per Country
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.