This post is part of Excel Dashboard Week
As part of Dashboard Week, in this post, we will take a look at Health-care Dashboard prepared and shared by Alberto.
Health-care Dashboard Snapshot:
[Click here to view large version]
How is this Dashboard Made? – An Overview:
Alberto put together an excellent dashboard to visualize hospital performance and understand what is going on.
Here is what I like about the dashboard:
- Clear title and ability to select which half-year you want to analyze.
- Subtle colors for non-data elements of the dashboard
- Alerts to highlight focus areas
- Clear and simple to read dashboard. Once you understand how to read the first line, you know how to read the rest.
- Sparklines, Conditional Formatting.
What can be improved in this dashboard?
- Formulas: Alberto used IF formulas to fetch the values for each half-year (semestre). Instead using INDEX or OFFSET would make his job simpler.
- Hardcoded targets: The target values for each metric are hard-coded. Instead, they should be put in a separate table, just like actual data.
- Solid Fill bars: Instead of using gradient fill data bars, it is better to use solid fill bars thru in-cell charts.
How is the dashboard constructed? – An overview Video:
I have made a short video to explain this dashboard to you. Watch it to understand how this dashboard is made and how you can use similar techniques.
Download the Health-care Dashboard Workbook
Click here to download the excel workbook for the Health-care Dashboard.
Thank you Alberto
I am really thankful to Alberto for taking time to share this file with us so we all can learn from his work.
If you enjoy this Dashboard, say thanks to Alberto.
Contribute to Excel Dashboard Week:
Share dashboard tips, snapshots, excel workbooks or links by filling out this simple online form. Go ahead and share what you got so that we all can learn from each other and become awesome.
Learn How to Make Excel Dashboards:
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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.