Steven, one of our readers from England sent me a Christmas gift tracker worksheet. I found it pretty cool, so made some minor changes to it and am sharing it with you all so that you can have great time shopping for the holidays.
Why I found this Christmas Gift List Spreadsheet Cool?
There are probably a million other gift trackers out there, but I liked Steven’s version for few reasons:
- He used conditional formatting to zebra line the gift-table.
- He used array formulas to find-out who is receiving the most expensive gift. The formula relies on VLOOKUP coupled with SUBTOTAL so that when you filter the list to see gifts only for certain age group, the formula shows most expensive gift receiver in that group alone. How cool is that 😎
- He used cell formatting to highlight gifts overshooting budget in RED color.
- He used SUMPRODUCT liberally to summarize the gift data to show us “how many people got the gifts”, “how many gifts are over the budget”, “how many gifts are under-budget”.
Go ahead and download the workbook. Even if you dont have a huge list of gifts to buy this Christmas (REALLY ?!? You dont have a long list? Can I please, please get that wii?). The workbook is full of excel lessons on conditional formatting, formulas and design.
Download the Christmas Gift List Spreadsheet
Click here to download the file. It is protected to make sure you accidentally erase a formula or something. But there is no password. So go ahead and unlock it to learn something cool.
Thank you Steven,
for your most thoughtful and awesome Christmas gift to our community.
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.