Once in a while everyone is bound to come across this problem. You type a formula in a cell, then you press ENTER. Bam! nothing happens. You check if a donut chunk went in to the key board and some how jammed the ENTER key. So press it again, this time harder. But nothing. Excel formula showing as text instead of actual result, like this:
Now what to do?
Of course, you can be careful when eating donuts. But careful donuts sure sounds like a paradox. So instead lets roll up our sleeves and find out the reason for this mishap.
The top reason for Excel formula showing as text :
You may have accidentally pressed CTRL+` (back quote symbol, the key below escape key in your keyboard) or activated the “Show Formulas” mode in Excel. 
When you do it, excel shows the formulas instead of their results.
To fix this error and get back the values (or results) just press CTRL+` again or click on the “Show formulas button”
The next reason why formulas are shown as formulas:
You may have set the cell formatting to “Text” and then typed the formula in it.
When you set the cell formatting to “Text”, Excel treats the formula as text and shows it instead of evaluating it.
To fix this error, just select the cell, set its formatting to “General”. Now edit the formula and press enter. (Alternatively you can press F2 and then Enter after setting format to General).
The less probable reason why formulas are shown as formulas instead of values:
You may have accidentally typed a single quote ‘ before the = sign in the formula.
When you type single quote ‘ in a cell excel treats the cell contents as text and does not evaluate any formulas within.
To fix this error, just remove the single quote.
What is your experience with excel formula errors?
The very first time I pressed CTRL+` by accident, it nearly freaked me out. All the columns became too wide and the formatting went for a toss. Everything looked weird. It took me a while to figure out that I accidentally pressed the Show Formulas shortcut (CTRL+`). I felt huge relief when I got the results back.
What about you? Did the formula error ever freaked you out? What other things about formulas worry you? Pls. share using comments.
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.