We, adults can’t escape three things:
- Deadlines
- Demanding bosses (replace with customers or nagging spouses or naughty kids)
- Taxes
While I can’t help you with demanding bosses or taxes, when it comes to deadlines, I have the right tool for you.
A tracker that highlights all overdue items so that you know where to focus your attention.
Let’s learn how to use awesome powers of Excel to find-out which items are due. You can apply these concepts to nail down over due invoices, pending project tasks or scheduling workforce.
Highlight overdue items using Excel Conditional Formatting – Video
Please watch the below video tutorial to understand how to highlight overdue items with conditional formatting.
You can watch this video on our YouTube channel too.
Interactive highlighter – use form controls + CF for awesome effect
In the downloadable workbook, find this cool interactive highlighter. Examine the formulas & conditional formatting rules to unlock the mystery behind this.
How to deal with deadlines?
Whenever I am doing a project, I use conditional formatting to keep track of the progress. In fact, right now, I have a file (with conditional formatting) to keep track of Awesome August festival.
What about you? How do you deal with deadlines & pending items? Please share your tips and ideas by writing a comment.
More on highlighting & deadlines
If you deal with a lot of deadlines (who doesn’t?), you will find below links very useful.
- Highlighting due dates in Excel – formulas & conditional formatting logic explained
- Make an interactive calendar to keep track of events & appointments
- Working with date & time values in Excel – an overview
- 5 Conditional formatting tips to make you a rock star at work
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.