Hello folks,
I have a quick announcement. As you may know, I am doing a set of Excel & Dashboards Masterclasses in Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane. We had a fantastic session in Sydney (with 18 delegates). We are sold out in Melbourne & have 2 spots left in Brisbane. But we kept getting requests for more in Melbourne. So we have added an additional session in Melbourne. This is right after Queen’s birthday – on 12th & 13th of June. Please use below links to enroll for the masterclass if you are interested.
What will you learn in this Masterclass
This masterclass is a 2 day program aimed to make you awesome in Advanced Excel & Dashboards. We start the first day with introduction to Excel & formulas and quickly move to data analysis using formulas & pivot tables. We end the day by constructing our first dashboard. On second day, we talk more about charting & dashboard theory and best practices. Then, we learn more about Excel charts, adding interactivity to them etc. We close the second day by modifying our dashboard to make it even more awesome.
Please click here to download the course brochure.
What do people think about our Masterclass?
We asked the delegates of our Sydney masterclass to tell us how they liked it. Here is a short video with their reviews (4 min):
Everyone loved the 2 days and found that they can apply the ideas & techniques to work immediately. If you use Excel more than a few hours every week, I am sure you will say the same. So go ahead and sign-up for the upcoming session.
Thanks
Thank you so much for taking time to learn from us. If you are interested to learn these techniques but do not live in Melbourne or Brisbane, please consider joining my Excel + VBA online course. It has the same material & covers more. You can go thru the class at your own pace and learn from the comfort of your home (or office). Click here to learn more about it.
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.