If excel school were to be a bar, this post is your last call. Come one, come all and order the course now.
Click here to sign-up for excel school
(on a lighter note, if excel school were to be a pie, we wouldn’t be having this conversation :P)
How many students have joined the school?
At the time of writing this post (Around 11pm on Feb 16) we have 94 students signed up. That is quite a bit more than what I expected. While I am a tiny bit scared, I am very keen to help as many more people as possible. So, go ahead and join the program, because I don’t know when I will re-open it.
Clarification about PayPal:
Few people have e-mailed me and asked, “I don’t have PayPal account, how do I sign-up?”.
Well, you don’t need a PayPal account if you use the one-time payment option. All you have to do is click on the link that says “Continue without creating a paypal account”. See this screenshot.
(You must create a PayPal account if you choose monthly payment option. This will give you ability to review your payment every month.)
When is it closing exactly?
I will be closing new registrations by 11:59 PM (Pacific Time) on today. Pacific time is GMT-8:00. See the below list to know when exactly the registration closes at your time zone.

Will the school re-open later this year?
That is my plan. But I don’t know if my kids permit me to fool around too much. You see, by then they would be talking.
So, Sign-up already!
Click here to sign-up for excel school
Bonus Excel Tip: How to convert times from one time zone to another?
Just because 100 people are joining excel school doesn’t mean that rest 7,900 of you should read a sales pitch. So here is a bonus tip.
If you want to convert times from one time zone to another (like above), you can use simple date arithmetic.
- Enter the date and time you want to convert in a cell (say in A1)
- Now, let us say you want to convert this to time zone 6 hours ahead of it.
- Simply write the formula
=A1 + 6/24to get the time in new time zone. - Hint: change
+6/24to-7/24if you want time in a zone that is 7 hours behind.
That is all. Happy time traveling.
PS: You would need a real time machine if you miss the dead line for excel school sign-up. You know what to do.

















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.