This post is part of Excel Dashboard Week
Early in Jan, I got this mail from Mara, a student in Excel School first batch.
Hi Chandoo,
I took your first Excel batch class and loved it. I created a dynamic and interactive dashboard for my work. My boss thinks it’s an excellent tool and I have you to thank for and also Francis Chin who shared his travel dynamic dashboard. I integrated things you taught so thanks so much!
I felt very proud reading her email, so I asked her if she can share the dashboard with some dummy data so that we all can learn from her example.
Being a lovely person Mara is, she gladly emailed me the workbook and I am thrilled to include it in Dashboard Week.
Customer Service Dashboard Snapshot:
Here is the dashboard that Mara prepared.
[View this dashboard image in full size | Demo of this dashboard]
Techniques used by Mara to Create this Dashboard:
Mara used several techniques to create this dashboard. But I specifically liked 5 things about this dashboard. They are,
- Tweetboard kind of area at the top where she showed summary of status. [Related tip]
- Dynamic dashboard which can be filtered based on a month.
- Interactive chart with check boxes to show / hide information. [Related tip]
- Interactive comparison chart to compare target with actual performances (of valet wait times). [Related tip]
- Scrollable list of various gift shop items. [Related tip]
Download Customer Service Dashboard Excel Workbook
Click here to download the workbook prepared by Mara.
I encourage you to examine the file and see how you can implement similar dashboard in your area of work.
Thank you Mara
Thank you so much for your generosity and enthusiasm to educate us. I have enjoyed examining your dashboard. You have shown creativity and skill in putting this together.
If you like this file, say thanks to Mara.
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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.