Darren writes one of my favorite blogs – Problogger, it is a blog about blogging. It is super helpful for people like me who write, connect, share and sell online. A week back, Darren asked his readers to participate in a fun experiment by posting 7 links on their blogs. It seemed like an interesting idea, so I am chipping in.
1. My First Post on Excel: While this blog is in existence since 2004, I did not start writing about excel until 2006. My first post on excel is How to remove duplicates. This was not written on chandoo.org, but on my excel blog r1c1.blogspot.com which I later imported here.
2. The post I enjoyed writing most: Now, this is difficult to choose. Because, writing is not what I enjoy most. My enjoyment comes when an article generates a lot of conversation (comments, discussion on other blogs etc.). To that extent, the most enjoyed post is Become a Conditional Formatting Rockstar.
3. Post(s) that had great discussion: I am proud of our community here. Most of the posts generate quite a bit of discussion and sharing of ideas. Here is a list of posts that had lots of insightful comments:
- Do you know these double click tricks? – 86 comments
- Introduction to VLOOKUP, MATCH and OFFSET formulas – 75 comments
- Become a Conditional Formatting Rockstar – 180 comments
- Calculating Days Overlapped Between 2 sets of dates – 46 comments
- Childhood dream comes true – story of Chandoo.org – 86 comments
- Excel Keyboard Shortcuts – Open Thread – 66 comments [read followup Comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts in Excel which consolidates all these shortcuts in to one post]
4. A post on someone else’s blog that I wish I’d written: 2 posts come to mind. First one is Debra’s unbelievably comprehensive collection of Pivot Table tips & tricks. Next one is Jon’s detailed overview of number formats in excel. Both of them are very well structured, highly sought after topics that I wish I had written. I refer to them every now and then when I am stuck and need help.
5. A post title that I am most proud of: Hands down it has to be Want to be a conditional formatting rock star? Read this. But I also like Twins, Clones and Duplicates – 6 Excel Shortcuts from an Excited Dad which I wrote from hospital room when I became dad to twins in Sept, 2009.
6. A post I wish more people had read: hmm, it could be the Date with my sheet – 10 tips on using date / time in Excel, which despite having a lot of tips, never really took off.
7. Most read post ever: It has to be the Gantt Charts – Project Management using Excel post. Written on June 16th, last year, the post attracted 150k page views so far, with 63 comments. The post also played a crucial role in 630+ sales of Project Management Templates.
One Question for you:
What is your most favorite post on Chandoo.org and why do you like it? Please share using comments.
PS: If you are not in mood for excel, here is something to get you excited. Some one calls me a bastard and it made me laugh. Find out why.
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.