If you are building financial models or any other type of excel based decision models, chances are, there will be multiple scenarios in your model. Whenever you have multiple scenarios, you may want an easy, intuitive way to select one of them. In this post, I will present an interesting scenario display & selection technique that I received by email from our reader Itay Maor.
First see the scenario selection in action:
Download the sample workbook with scenario selection macro
Click here to download the workbook (.xlsm file) that Itay emailed me.
How does this work?
In order to understand how this works, first you must know the limitations of this file. It can only support up to 5 scenarios.
The workbook has a bunch of macros – ChangeScenario, AddTab, RemoveTab, RenameTab etc.
Here is how the magic behind this macro is cast:
- When you click any tab, that particular scenario’s input values are loaded by running ChangeScenario macro
- When you click the ‘x’ button, that particular scenario’s tab is hidden and other tabs are moved accordingly by running the macro RemoveTab.
- When you click the ‘+’ button, a new scenario tab is displayed by un-hiding one of the remaining tabs. This uses the macro AddTab.
- When you close the workbook, the tab order, scenario values are all preserved automatically.
The workbook uses very simple but clever macros to hide / un-hide tabs and display and select scenarios. I encourage you to dissect the macros and play with the file to understand it better. Go here to download the file.
Thank you Itay,
Thank you so much for sharing your work with us Itay. I have learned some valuable macro tricks exploring your code. I am sure our readers will be able to learn something from it. Thank you.
How do you handle multiple scenarios?
I never used a technique like Itay’s. Usually I prefer a scenario selection sheet with data validation and conditional formatting (more on this later in a post). I would like to know how you handle multiple scenarios. Please share using comments.
Share your workbooks, example files with us
I am always looking for new and interesting ways to solve problems using Excel. If you have something fun, exciting or useful to share, please email me your workbook / tip / article to at chandoo.d @ gmail.com. I would love to learn from you and share your ideas with others here.
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).
----------------------------
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.