Here is a familiar problem:
You create a workbook to track some data. You ask your staff to fill up the data. Almost all the input data is fine, except the date column. Every one types dates in their own format.
Here is a fun, simple & powerful way to warn your users when they enter wrong dates.
Use conditional formatting
Here is a quick demo:
How to ensure cleaner dates with conditional formatting?
- Let’s say your users need to enter date input in cell C3.
- Select C3 and go to Home > Conditional Formatting > New Rule
- Select the rule type as “Use a formula…”
- Use a formula like this: =ISERROR(DAY($C$3))
- Set up formatting to highlight incorrect dates
- Done
Explanation for the formula:
We will assume that C3 contains a valid date and try to do some sort of date operation on it, like finding the day of month using DAY($C$3). If this returns an error, that means we have an invalid date.
So to check the error status, we use ISERROR().
A caveat: dates are numbers
Since Excel dates are numbers, technically, your users can type a number in C3 (like 7) and our conditional formatting won’t trigger the error.
Bonus tip: Adding conditional formatting to an entire column
To add conditional formatting to an entire column,
- Let’s say the date inputs go to column C, starting with C3 as first input
- Select all the cells in column C that will have dates
- Set up the conditional formatting with below rule:
- =ISERROR(DAY($C3))
Download example workbook
Click here to download a simple example workbook with this technique. Examine the conditional formatting in C3 & D3 to learn more.
Do you use CF to nudge your users in right direction?
Excel Conditional Formatting is one of my all time favourite features. I use liberal amounts of CF on all my Excel recipes. I think CF makes a great ingredient if you are collecting user inputs.
What about you? Do you use conditional formatting to make sure your inputs are clean? What techniques do you use? Please share your thoughts and tips in the comments area.
Here are few more awesome ways to use conditional formatting:
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.