Recently, I saw this chart on Economist website.
It is trying to depict how various cities rank on livability index and how they compare to previous ranking (2014 vs 2009).
As you can see, this chart is not the best way to visualize “Best places to live”.
Few reasons why,
- The segregated views (blue, gray & red) make it hard to look for a specific city or region
- The zig-zag lines look good, but they are incredibly hard to understand
- Labels are all over the place, thus making data interpretation hard.
- Some points have no labels (or ambiguous labels) leading to further confusion.
After examining the chart long & hard, I got thinking.
Its no fun criticizing someones work. Creating a better chart from this data, now thats awesome.
So I went looking for the raw data behind this graphical mess. Turns out, Economist sells this data for a meager price of US $5,625.
Alas, I was saving my left kidney for something more prominent than a bunch of raw data in a workbook. May be if they had sparklines in the file…
So armed with the certainty that my kidney will stay with me, I now turned my attention to a similar data set.
I downloaded my website visitor city data for top 100 cities in September 2014 & September 2013 from Google Analytics.
And I could get it for exactly $0.00. Much better.
This data is similar to Economist data.
Chart visualizing top 100 cities
Here is a chart I prepared from this data.
This chart (well, a glorified table) not only allows for understanding all the data, but also lets you focus specific groups of cities (top % changes, new cities in the top 100, cities that dropped out etc.) with ease.
Download top 100 cities visualization – Excel workbook
Click here to download this workbook. Examine the formulas & formatting settings to understand how this is made.
How is this visualization made?
Here is a video explaining how the workbook is constructed. [see it on our YouTube channel]
The key techniques used in this workbook are,
- SUMIFS, INDEX + MATCH formulas for figuring out data
- Sorting data by a particular column
- Conditional formatting to show % change arrows
- Form controls for user interactivity
Since the process of creating this visualization is similar to some of the earlier discussed examples, I recommend you go thru below if you have difficulty understanding this workbook:
- Suicides vs. Murders – interactive Excel chart
- Gender Gap chart in Excel
- Visualizing world education rankings
- Analyzing survey results with panel charts
How would you visualize similar data?
Here is a fun thought experiment. How would you visualize such data? Please share your thoughts (or example workbooks) in the comments. I & rest of our readers are eager to learn from you.
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.