Last week we saw a really cool holiday request form made by Theodor.
This week, we will learn how to combine conditional formatting and data validation to create an awesome data entry form.
First see a demo to understand what I mean:
How to create such a data entry form?
Very simple, just grab a cup of coffee (or your favorite fried-nuts-crushed-and-brewed-with-hot-water) and follow my lead.
Step 1: Set up Data Validation
Assuming you need to gather some inputs, like shown above. First thing to do would be setting up data validation rules in a cell so that your users can specify the type of data they are entering. For eg. they can choose card or paypal or other as payment mode and depending on that, enter further details.
To do this, just select the cell and go to Data > Validation. Choose “List” as the rule and give values.
Step 2: Add conditional formatting rules.
Now, based on the selected value, we need to highlight a set of cells.
Assuming all the data to be gathered in cells C4:G4,
Select first two cells (C4:D4), go to Home > Conditional Formatting > New Rule
Here, we need to tell Excel to highlight the C4 and D4 if the type of payment is Card.
So choose the CF rule type as “Use a formula to determine which cells to format” and the check if $B4 is “card”.
Tip: We need to use $B4 since we want Excel to check column B even if we are applying formatting to C4 or D4. Read more.Step 3: Add Conditional Formatting rules to other cells (E4:F4, G4)
Using the same logic.
Step 4: Bask in glory!
That is all. There is no step 4. We are done. Finish the coffee or whatever you mixed with hot water. Just save the file and send it to your customer, vendor or boss. Bask in glory as there will be fewer data entry mistakes and more awesome.
Home work: Get Creative and do more
You can use some creativity and make the data entry form even more awesome. For example, you could show a tick mark when the data entry is complete. Also you could highlight only when the cell is blank (ie if the data is already entered, there is no point highlighting)
See what I came up with:
I am not going to tell you how to do the above. That is for you to figure out.
Download Excel Files
Click here to download the excel file with the data entry form example. Play with it to understand how to make similar forms. Become awesome!
And if you can not solve the homework problem, download this file and examine it.
How do you make your data entry forms awesome?
I love data validation. It makes the whole process of gathering valid data dead simple. Also, it is an excellent way to change month or other settings in dashboards. (example 1, 2, 3)
What about you? How do you use Data Validation and other excel features to make your input forms both simple and awesome? Please share your experiences and ideas using comments. Go!
Learn More About Data Validation & Conditional Formatting:
As I said earlier, I really love data validation, conditional formatting features of Excel. They are quite powerful and very useful when working with lots of data. We have very good information about these features on chandoo.org. Start with the below articles to learn more.
- What is Conditional Formatting and how to use it? [Video]
- How to create a simple data validation list?
- 5 tips to become conditional formatting rock star
- More tutorials & tips on conditional formatting, data validation
- Recommended: Join Excel School if you work with data often. You will save a ton of time.
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.