Peter T,

Thanks for the help. Your suggestion was essentially duplicated Andy
Pope's, and they worked!

For what it's worth, I am drawing a chart that shows software size, planned
percent complete, and actual percent complete. The software size bars show
what percentage of the total software falls into each of the categories on
the chart. The planned and actual percent complete bars are scaled so that
if percent complete = 100%, the bar is the same height as the corresonding
size bar. They are formatted so that they are side-by-side, and both fit
within the corresponding total size bar, which obviously is a little more
than twice as wide as the percentage bars. The total size bar is royal blue
(RGB(0,0,255)), and the plot area is white. If I make the text in the
labels black, it doesn't show up well against the dark blue; if I make it
white, then obviously it doesn't show up against the plot area (which can
happen when percent complete is near 100%).

For what it's worth, I inherited the format. It was designed for use with
Vice Presidents, so attractiveness of appearance was a major consideration!

-- David

"Peter T" <peter_t@discussions wrote in message
...
arrY = ActiveChart.SeriesCollection(i).Values
for p = 1 to ubound(arrY)
myPointVal = arrY(p)
etc

In passing, not sure why you say textboxes are easier to control than
Datalabels, I would have thought the opposite irrespective of any complex
formats

Regards,
Peter T


"David Benson" wrote in message
...
I have a somewhat complex set of bar-charts. Some (but not all) of the
data series that make up each chart have the values of the points
displayed. Due to the complex formatting of the charts, I can't just
display the values using Data Labels, so I display them in Text Boxes. I
have written a macro that automatically positions each text box just above
the bar whose value it shows, and changes the formatting of the text box
based on the formatting of whatever it happens to be positioned over.

Until now, I got the value associated with each bar from the actual cells
on the worksheet. However, a recent change to the requirements for the
charts means I am not always plotting data from a contiguous range. For
example, a data range might consist of Sheet2!(E2,E7:E10) on one chart,
or Sheet 3!(E3:E9) on another chart. This makes looking up the value for
each bar in the chart-formatting macro harder.

I would like to be able to use the set of plotted values rather than
reading cells off the worksheet, but I can't figure out how to get at
them. I tried using ActiveChart.SeriesCollection(i).Points(j), but there
is no Values property associated with this object. I also tried using
ActiveChart.SeriesCollection(i).Values, but that apparently only returns
the array of plotted values -- I can't get it to return a single value.

Does anyone know how I can return the plotted y-value of a single point?

BTW - I am using Excel 2007. As a side comment, it appears to me that
the Help function in this version of VBA is seriously degraded from what
it used to be in Excel 2003!


David Benson