Check out the sample mobile analytics dashboard by Percent Mobile. It is like google analytics, but for mobile device based traffic. I liked the way they presented the information of website traffic that is coming from mobile devices.
What is WOW about it?
The top portion of the dashboard shows quick summary. This is one of the key principles of any good dashboard. Displaying summary at the top and providing detail at bottom. This creates a logical flow and viewer can decide for herself which details to seek.
The bar charts below are executed well. Often we are tempted to use colors and rich formatting, but when you use simple colors, then naturally the attention shifts from formatting to information. I like the way the charts look subtle but still provide good information, thanks to labels.
What can be improved in this chart?
The mobile ecosystem area of the dashboard looks good but it is difficult to spot any trends. Few things I can think of to improve this are,
- Reduce the number of phones displayed here to say Top 5
- Try something else like a tag cloud, but with images. It adds novelty and drives attention to most important devices.
- Restructure information by dimensions like touch-screen devices, gaming devices, good old mobile phones so that viewer will know what type of devices are visiting the site more.
What is your opinion on this dashboard?
Cool or awful? How would you improve it?
More on dashboards: KPI Dashboards using Excel (6 part tutorial and downloads), Excel Dashboards theory, principles and tutorials
[Hat tip to Digital Inspiration for percent mobile]
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.