Hello folks…
Time for a fun & useful survey. This time lets talk about Excel Interview Questions.
Many of you are silently becoming awesome in Excel, data analysis, charting, dashboard reporting, VBA, Power Pivot and business skills, thanks to all the time you spend on Chandoo.org. I am sure there will be a day in near future, when you have to face another interview and be selected for a challenging, fun & high paying role.
Likewise, there is also a significant portion of you who are too good in your job that you will become a senior manager, VP or CXO, or better still start your own business. When the tables have turned, you will be the one looking for smart, dedicated, talented and fun individuals to join your team and make you look even more awesome.
So my question for both prospective interviewees and wannabe Excel pros,
According to you, what are the best Excel interview questions?
I will go first.
My top 5 Excel interview questions
Assuming I am looking for an analyst who can take any data dumped at her and turn it in to insights, actionable statements or management summaries, I will ask her below questions for sure.
- How do you lookup particular items from a large data set? Discuss various approaches, why they work, where they fail using this example data set.
- Can you make this ugly, confusing model in to usable, simple & elegant one?
- Assuming you have sales data of various products in several regions over the last 36 months, what kind of charts you prepare to help us understand what is going on and where we should focus?
- Can you analyze the same sales data using pivot tables. Can you compare pivot analysis with formula approach and comment?
- How well do you know about our business? Can you create a high level model of how we make money in Excel? After I explain how we make money in words of course.
- Bonus question: Which resources you use to keep yourself ahead of others in this position. (websites, books, training programs etc.)
What about you?
Go ahead and share your best interview questions. Use your experience as an interviewer or interviewee. Click below link.
Take up Excel interview questions survey.
Have an interview coming up soon?
Then brush up your skills. Start with these pages and let your curiosity go wild.
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).
----------------------------
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.