Sachin Tendulkar is undoubtedly the best cricketers to play One Day International Cricket. He is a source of inspiration and joy for me and many others. So, naturally I was jumping with joy when I heard that he scored the highest ever runs in a single match on 24th of Feb. He scored 200 runs (first ever double century in one day cricket), batted for all the 50 overs and remained not out. A true symbol of passion and excellence. [his cricinfo profile, commentary on 200 score]
But what has all this got to do with Excel? Well, some of you know that I am fan of Sachin. Last time he became the highest scorer in test cricket, we celebrated that with a dashboard of test cricket statistics. Similarly, now too, I have prepared an info-graphic poster on Sachin showcasing his achievements. See it below,
[if the below image is kind of messed up, click here to see it in full]
Behind the poster:
I have made this poster in Excel 2010 (it has sparklines, that is why). The data is from Cricinfo’s statsguru page.
Download the original poster excel file (you need Excel 2007 or above to play with this).
Also, if you want to see the entire poster as one image click here.
Congratulate Sachin
Sachin is a hero in my world. He has been inspiring me to do better for the last 20 years. I am sure some of you are inspired by his passion, commitment and excellence in the Sport of Cricket. Join me and congratulate him.
Previous Visualization Projects
From time to time, I indulge in some fun visualization projects where we push the limits of Excel to do something awesome. Some of the earlier attempts are,
Flu trends chart in Excel | History of Excel – a timeline | Visualizing Olympic Medals since 1900.
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.