Hi Jon,

Thnx a lot for your detailed reply.

I suspect that this was not a conscious design decision, and it may even
have been made by different people or by one person at different times.
This is a clincher argument. I gather now that design decision was made by 2
different people from the client side.
(Im amazed by your assertion -- or by one person at different times.-- I
could never have thought of angle.)

Thanks a lot,
Hari
India

"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
Hari -

Based on your usage of the word -- simple charting-- I wanted to ask
about the pros and cons of
a) pasting as a picture

When I worked as an engineer, I used this approach for two reasons. (1) it
was a convenient visual way to archive status at a given point, as the
charts were static. (2) I could submit reports without worrying that my
supervisor and his supervisor would not be able to distort my message.
They were not interested in seeing how another chart type might look (they
wouldn't know a line chart from the Magna Carta). They were only concerned
about making things look "better" or at least "not so bad", and numerical
engineering was not out of the question.

Most of my clients are pretty comfortable within Excel, and only want
exports to Word or PowerPoint for reporting purposes. They prefer to
rework the data in Excel rather than in the report. Pasting pictures is a
lightweight way to do this. If they need to make changes, it's generally
because the bulk of the report is changing (additional data has come in,
or it's time for next month's report). It makes more sense for the VBA to
generate a new report from Excel, than to have linked charts interspersed
within text that must be redone.

b) pasting with the excel workbook data

Alternatives:

1. Copy the chart sheet into an otherwise empty workbook, and copy this
chart into PowerPoint. The data will not be available upon editing or
opening the chart.
2. Copy the chart in Excel, and do Paste Link in PowerPoint, but I believe
this is only possible in VBA starting in 2003.

This allows the chart to have any of the advanced custom features allowed
in Excel.

c) using DATASHEET/GRAPH.

This can be done within Excel, as you've discovered, but it insulates the
MSGraph chart from the Excel data.

I would only keep this option if it were important to maintain conformance
with existing charts, and if the charts were simple ones. However, the
nature of MSGraph is that you lose most of your control over independent
series in the chart. Your choice of combination charts is limited. You
can't link text elements to cells in the datasheet. You can only have one
set of X values in the entire chart, in the row above row 1 or the column
left of column A. In general I have also had difficulties programming
MSGraph which are not present using Excel.

Nobody in my company knows why such a combination was made.

I suspect that this was not a conscious design decision, and it may even
have been made by different people or by one person at different times.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
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