Have you ever jumped back to normal view from print preview and noticed the annoying page break lines? They look distracting. They are like a naughty kid shouting for attention. look at me!!!
How do we get rid of those lines after completing our business with print preview?!?
Very simple. We just copy everything, press CTRL+C and then paste in a new workbook!
Of course, I am kidding. There is a better way.
You can click on Office button > Excel Options > Advanced > Scroll down to “Display options for this…” and then un-check Show Page Breaks option.
Aah, it would be much more simple to take a flight, go to Colombia, visit a coffee estate, gather beans, bring them back home, roast and ground them and make a coffee.
But then, we are not after Coffee. We are after those nasty print preview lines.
So here is a much simpler option to get rid of them, on click of button.
We just write a macro.
- Press ALT+F11 in your workbook to go to Visual Basic Editor (VBE).
- Now, locate Personal macros workbook in the project explorer. Just open the macros module (or insert a new one). [more on this here]
- Write a single line macro like this:
Sub disablePageBreaks()
ActiveSheet.DisplayPageBreaks = False
End Sub - Save your personal macros workbook.
- Come back to Excel (ALT+F11 again).
- Add this macro as a button to Quick Access Toolbar
- Now, you can just press the QAT button or use the relevant ALT shortcut (for eg. if the macro button is 4th one in QAT, you can just press ALT+4 to run it).
That is all. Now with all the saved time, you can go to Colombia for a cup of coffee. Make sure you bring me a kilo of that Juan Valdez beans.
More on Printing:
If you like to print and hurt a few trees, make sure you have read these.
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.