Hello my friend,
I have a few quick updates to start the week. Just read on to keep up.
Excel VBA section of Chandoo.org
During last few weeks, I have spent several hours organizing all the VBA material on Chandoo.org. I am happy to announce our brand to Excel VBA area of the site.
This section has Excel VBA overview, examples, videos, tips, books, references & more. Check it out.
Improved Chandoo.org Homepage
One of my goals for 2012 is to improve the navigability of Chandoo.org so that new visitors & regulars can become awesome in Excel faster. As the first step in this direction, I have added a welcome navigation area to our home page. You can see it in action on our home page.
Nested Comments on Chandoo.org
During last week, finally I have learned enough PHP to enable nested comments on our site. Now, you can reply to anyone comments and they would look the way they are supposed to.
Excel Pivot Tables Page
Ok, this is available for a while. But not many of you know. So here we go. You can find a ton of useful information, tips, examples & downloads on our Excel Pivot Tables page.
Join our VBA Classes
As you may know, we have opened registrations for our VBA classes last week. More than 190 people have joined already and as you read this, they are becoming awesome in Excel & VBA. If you are looking for a step-by-step guide to Excel VBA, please consider joining our classes.
Click here to join our VBA classes.
Relocating to Bangkok, Thailand Temporarily
Ok, this is more of personal news. We (Jo, kids & I) are moving to Bangkok for a few months. We have been living in Vizag (India) for almost 2 years now and wanted a change of scene. We barely traveled in last few years because our kids were too young. So we are really excited to visit Bangkok and spend a few months exploring Thailand, learning a few new things and relaxing.
It is unlikely that I will be able to write any new Excel stuff this week. So I have scheduled a few posts to keep you busy. I am hoping to settle down & get net connection by this weekend so that I can resume our Excel journey next week.
Until then, I wish you awesome time in Excel & work.
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.