Sam,
I can only sympathize with you - I just had to create some charts (a
veritable nightmare for the first time in 2007) and the chart has about 9600
data points on it (11 series with 800 points each) and it absolutely brings
my system to a grinding halt just to change the color of one of the data
series lines:
AMD X2 4800+, 2GB RAM, 1.3TB disk space - Windows XP Pro/SP2 and Office 2007
Pro. I'm not looking forward to putting as many as 50 similar charts on a
single sheet or even in a single workbook.

Just about any change made causes same type of system slowdown, took me
forever to just change one of the 11 data series lines from the default
kindergarden crayon width of 2.25 pts to .25 points so more sense could be
made out of it.

You are not alone in your misery, and I'll be watching this hoping that
someone that has got large data set charting working in a responsive manner
will drop in and tell us the secret.

"sam" wrote:

Very frustrated with this problem.
I have about 1000 data points and insert a chart (any type, such as line,
bar, or scatter) from those data, then I go "format axis" to change the
minimum or maximum from "auto" to a specific number. Afther that, whenever I
click on the plot, excel will stop responding for a couple minute. I am
dealing with large data every day. This is killing me.