Note: This is a not an Excel tips post. It is a diary of one of the most awesome conferences I have ever attended.
I just finished attending PASS Business Analytics conference in Santa Clara (USA) and am now heading back home to India. And it has been one of the most fun, uplifting and educational experiences of my life. I met so many remarkable people in this trip.
Just to name a few, I met Dan Fylstra (one of the pioneers of VisiCalc & founder of Solver), Bob Phillips, Ken Puls, Jordan Goldmeier, Oz Du Soliel, Rick Grantham, Szilvia Juhasz, Zack Baresse, Kevin Jones, Avi Singh, Chris Webb, Rob Collie, Bill Jelen, Scott Senkeresty, Matt Allington, Jon Acampora, Marco Russo & Jen Stirrup.
I also felt fortunate to meet many of Chandoo.org fans, followers, customers & supporters who attended the conference. It was non stop fun for 3 days.
As if meeting all these great people, sharing a conversation, beer, snack, moment or ride (in a cramped backseat with 2 other Excel MVPs) with them was not enough, I also got to attend few of the amazing sessions at PASS BA.
- I learned CUBE formulas from Bob Phillips
- Introduction to R from Jen Stirrup
- Power Query trickery from Chris Webb
- Charting best practices from Jordan
- Keynote presentations by Mico & Carlo
I wish I had the time to attend more sessions. But I was busy teaching a few or meeting people.
All in all, in one word, PASS Business Conference has been AWESOME.
Couple of funny & interesting experiences from the conference:
5 MVPs in a car
At the end of day 3 (April 22nd), a bunch of us were sitting at the hotel lobby bar and chatting. When I asked Ken (Excelguru) what they are doing for dinner, Ken said Zack is taking him for dinner. Then Zack looked at me and said, “why don’t you tag along?”
By then we were 4 people – Ken, Zack, Wessex Bob & myself.
We all agreed to head back to rooms, fresh up & meet downstairs in 20 minutes.
When we all came down, Jordan was also at the bar area. So we asked him to join us.
Jordan, Bob & I shared the backseat and lots of laughs all the way to some upscale sea food restaurant in another suburb of San Francisco.
Here is a selfies from backseat of Zack’s car.
Bob, Jordan & Chandoo
We meet Kevin Jones there and we all share really amazing food, insightful (often hilarious) conversation. As Ken recently quit his job to be self-employed, we all shared our words of wisdom with him.
But the night is not over yet
We reached the hotel at 9:30. I find Rob, Scott, Matt, few members from Microsoft Excel & Power BI teams all having drinks at the lobby bar. So I joined them for more laughs, conversation & selfies.
Here is a pic with Rob, Scott, Matt & Ken
Chandoo, Rob, Matt, Scott & Ken
By the time I head to my room it was 11:30 PM.
Dany’s Recalc or Die stricker
Dany Hoter from Excel team has this cool laptop sticker.
Almost all the Excel MVPs at the conference in one epic pic
And here it is:
Zack, Jon, Bob, Ken, Chris, Marco, Gregory
Cat, Oz, Chandoo, Rick & Szilvia
My first impressions of everyone
This is the first time I met so many Excel MVPs & bloggers. Here is the first thought that came to me when I saw them.
- Ken: He is big!!! and he talks fast
- Oz: What a hat! and whats with the Sriracha hot sauce?!?
- Rick: he means business
- Dan Fylstra: Wow, he is so cool & down to earth
- Scott: Boy his laughter is really loud
- Avi: small packet of energy & enthusiasm
- Bob: funny and awesomely English
Thank you PASS & everyone who showed up
Thanks a lot to the PASS team for inviting me to this conference. I had an awesome time.
Also thanks to everyone from Chandoo.org community who signed up for this event & made it even more awesome. Thank 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).
----------------------------
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.