This is first part of 2 part series on conditionally formatting dates in excel.
Conditional formatting is a very useful feature in Excel. You can use Conditional formatting to tell excel how to format cells that meet certain conditions. For eg. You can use conditional formatting to show all negative values in a range in red color. [Learn conditional formatting basics].
Today we will learn how to use conditional formatting to format dates.
Click on the below links to jump to relevant section.
Excel 2007+ – Conditional Formatting Dates
Excel 2003 – Conditional Formatting Dates
Excel 2007+ – Conditional Formatting Dates
In Excel 2007, MS introduced several useful shortcuts to conditionally format dates. When you select some cells and click on Conditional Formatting button on ribbon and select “Highlight cells Rules” > “A date occurring”, Excel presents you quick shortcuts to frequent date criteria. This list includes options to format,
- A Date if it is yesterday
- Today
- Tomorrow,
- In the last 7 days
- Last week
- This Week
- Next Week
- Last Month
- This Month
- Next Month
Using this feature, you can quickly format the dates in your data meeting certain criteria.
This is very useful in situations where you want to highlight for eg. sales in last week. As the dates change, the highlighted values change dynamically.
Apart from these predefined date conditions, you can define your own conditions using formulas.
Excel 2003 – Conditional Formatting Dates
Unlike Excel 2007, there are no shortcuts for conditional date formatting in Excel 2003. You have to rely on Conditional Formatting Formulas to do this.
What is a conditional formatting formula?
In excel you can use formulas to determine which cells get the special formatting thru conditional formatting. For eg. a formula like =A1>50 applied over the range A1:A10 will highlight the cells with value more than 50.
So, to check if the date in cell A1 is yesterday, you can write a simple formula like,
=TODAY()-A1=1. [help on TODAY formula]
Here are some formulas to get you started,
- To check if a date is in the last 7 days:
=TODAY()-A1<7 - To check if a date is in the current week:
=AND(WEEKNUM(A1)=WEEKNUM(TODAY()), YEAR(A1)=YEAR(TODAY())) - To check if a date is in the current month:
=AND(MONTH(A1)=MONTH(TODAY()), YEAR(A1)=YEAR(TODAY())) - To check if a date is in the last 30 days:
=TODAY()-A1<30
[Help on AND formula, MONTH formula, YEAR formula, IF formula]
Using above formula based conditional formatting you can easily determine if a date meets a given criteria and highlight it.
A Practical Application – Highlighting Repeat Customers
Let us say you run a small retail store. And you want to give special discounts to all the repeat customers. In your mind a repeat customer is someone who bought twice from you in last 30 days. (If the person bought twice but the gap between 2 purchases is more than 30 days they are not repeat customers).
In tomorrow’s post I will show you how to highlight repeat customers using excel conditional formatting. Stay tuned.
Learn more about Excel Conditional Formatting
- Excel conditional formatting basics
- Using formulas in excel conditional formatting – 5 kickass examples
- Highlight Top 10 items in a list – using conditional formatting
- More tutorials on Conditional Formatting, Excel Dates, Excel Date Formulas
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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.