The OLE treatment of Excel charts in other applications was a pain, but
double clicking brought up the chart inside a miniature Excel instance, so
you could still do pretty much what you wanted with it. In addition, the OLE
chart was accessible by VBA, so your program could also make adjustments.
The new Office-wide charts seem to work pretty nicely, though I haven't used
them much. They are not accessible by VBA, however, which I've already found
to be a major disadvantage. Fortunately you can still use OLE techniques in
Office 2007.

FWIW, there's more than enough eye candy in Excel 2003. You can change the
palette to prevent problems with colors being too similar. You shouldn't
need more than 56 colors, really. Dealing with colors programmatically was
also much easier in 2003 than in 2007.

The rest of the eye candy, all the new gradients, the shadows, the glowing
effects, the bevels and other 3D effects, are all just gratuitous
formatting, which is more likely to detract from, not enhance, a chart. It's
easier than ever to make a bad chart, faster than ever before.

Charts are not about eye candy, they are about visualization to facilitate
information analysis and transfer. Charts are about communication, about
science and statistics and engineering. Eye candy is about marketing and
emotion and distraction.

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


"dparizo" wrote in message
...
Why doesn't "eye candy" count? That's what charts are.

But I'll name one anyway: the way charts are integrated into the Office
Suite has improved a ton. When I cut & paste a chart into Powerpoint, and
then later go back to edit the chart in Powerpoint, the ribbon in
Powerpoint
gives me most (maybe all -- I'm not sure) of the options I would have
natively in Excel -- it's a real improvement for me. It's not eye
candy --
it saves me a lot of time.

But again, in the case of charts, eye candy is important. Charts are
visual. When users look at a chart and get distracted because two colors
look too similar (something that happened a lot in Excel 2003) it's a
problem. Excel 2007 fixed that. It is eye candy, and in the case of
charting, it's important.

"Jon Peltier" wrote:

Name one improvement that isn't eye candy.

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


"dparizo" wrote in message
...
I'm guessing it's you. :-) I think charting in Excel 2007 is greatly
improved.