Today is Diwali, the festival of lights. I wish you and your family a happy, bright and prosperous festive time. May your house shower with lots of light, laughter and love.
Diwali is one of my favorite festivals. It is a time when all family members get together, eat delicious food, laugh to hearts content and light up diyas (small oil lamps) to celebrate the victory of good over evil. This year, my kids (who are 6 yrs btw) are very excited about the festival. They are looking forward to lighting up diyas and crackers (fire works).
To celebrate the holiday, I made something for you.
An animated flower pot firework in Excel.
Here is a quick demo:
Download the flower pot chart
Click here to download the flower pot cracker chart. Click on the flower pot (triangle) to light up the fireworks.
How is this made?
Let’s keep it brief, after all, it’s festival time and I can’t sit in front of computer all day.
Flower pot:
- The flower pot sprinkles fire in parabolic shape.
- So we make 10 parabolas going to right and 10 to left (using the equation y=ax2 + bx + c)
- The parabolas stop midway because the fire dies. So we stop when y reaches RANDBETWEEN(30,90)% of maximum y.
- We then plot these 20 equations using XY scatter plot and color the lines differently.
- Using a simple VBA script, we increase the X value from o to 89 and feed the XY values to chart one step at a time
- This creates the flower pot fire cracker effect.
Tinkling diya:
- We make a single column bar chart and use light wick shape to fill the column
- We then increase the column height from 100 to 110 and then back to 100 in a loop
- This creates the effect of light going up and down, a la tinkling diya.
For more, check out the downloadable workbook, examine the hidden calc worksheet and code in module1.
Want to create such animated charts – Read on
Animation is a powerful way to attract user attention. Check out these pages to learn more.
- Another Diwali animated chart in Excel
- Journey of Hurricane Sandy – Animated Chart
- 3D Dancing pendulums using Excel Charts & VBA
- Designing a clock using Excel
- Animation with out macros [for fun]
Want more? Consider our VBA course
If you want to learn more about animation & other VBA techniques, consider joining our online VBA classes. In a few weeks, you can master all aspects of Excel VBA & Macros.
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.