Finally, I got some time to sit down and do what I love most – write a blog post to make you awesome in Excel. After a whirlwind trip to Sydney, I am back in India to spend few days with my kids & wife before rushing to Australia to run 2nd leg of my training programs (in Perth, Melbourne & Brisbane). I did 2 sessions in Sydney – one for KPMG and other for public and both went very well. We got lots of positive feedback and people really loved it. I am saving the details for another post, but today lets talk about Interactive Sales Chart using Excel.
Take a look at the Interactive Sales Chart
First, take a look at interactive sales chart. Today, you will learn how to build this using Excel.
Inspiration for this chart
Before we learn how you can create such a chart, let me tell where the inspiration came from. Yesterday, Persol, a forum member asked, How to make an info-radar chart, where he mentioned the below chart from Good.is
[Click here to play with this chart]
While I took inspiration from the above chart, I replaced the radar chart with a regular column chart (as column charts are easier to read) and modified the data to a sales data set.
How to create interactive sales chart in Excel?
First, take a look at the data
The sales data for this chart looked like this:
I have set up this data in an Excel Table called as tblSales so that it is easier to write formulas.
The formulas
To calculate various values in the chart, we use ample doses of SUMIFS formula.
The Interactivity
When you click on any year, region or product name, we run worksheet_seletionchange event. This tells our calculation engine which year, region & product are chosen. Then the formulas would (re)calculate the data for charts. This updates the charts & conditional formats.
[Related: Show on-demand details in Excel using VBA]
Here is how the interactive chart works:
How to create interactive charts like this – Video
Since the actual mechanics of this are quite elaborate, I made a short video (15 min) explaining how various parts of this chart work. Please watch it below.
[You can watch the video on our Youtube channel too]
Download Interactive Sales Chart Workbook
Click here to download the workbook & play with it. Examine the macros & formulas to learn more.
How do you like this chart?
I really liked Good.is chart and wanted to see how much of it we can do in Excel. It was a fun exercise. I have noticed that such charts excite people (decision makers too) and make your reports fun.
What about you? How do you like the interactive sales chart? What additions / modifications would you do to it? Please share your thoughts using comments.
Create Interactive Charts using Excel
Interactive charts are one my favorite visualizations. They let users play with the chart & decide what they want. So, naturally I write about them every now and then. Please go thru these examples if you want to learn various interactive charting techniques in Excel.
- Show top x values in a chart interactively
- Interactive dashboard using hyperlinks
- Suicides vs. Murders – Interactive Excel Chart
- Create a quick dynamic chart in Excel
- Interactive charts that leave your boss drooling
- More on Interactive Charts
I also recommend enrolling in our Excel + VBA Class if you want to learn these techniques and create stunning reports & charts. Click here to learn more about our Excel + VBA training program.
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.