I have numerous charts that will eventually be copied into Powerpoint. I want
to edit all of them at one time to have the same formatting. When I choose
more than one chart, the formatting for the charts is not available. This is
very frustrating as now I will have to change each segment of each chart. Is
there a way to choose multiple charts and edit them or am I barking up a very
empty tree?

On Fri, 18 May 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
ccinseward said:

I have numerous charts that will eventually be copied into Powerpoint. I want
to edit all of them at one time to have the same formatting. When I choose
more than one chart, the formatting for the charts is not available. This is
very frustrating as now I will have to change each segment of each chart. Is
there a way to choose multiple charts and edit them or am I barking up a very
empty tree?

None that I know of. I think the best you can do is Copy a whole chart,
and Paste just its format using Paste Special. This doesn't always give
you the results you want as cleanly as you want, but give it a try. But
beware of chart titles: Excel treats them as "format" when they are
obviously "content", so you will end up with your chart title copied
across to all the charts that you are pasting the supposed "formatting
only" in. If you create and format special text boxes as your titles,
that may be better.

Or you can save and load a Custom Chart Type. This is much like paste
formatting in its effects.

Finally, you can format an element of one of your charts, and, being
careful not to disturb the cached action, go through the other charts
pressing F4. Then do the same for other parts of the formatting. It's
repetitive, but at least you're doing less work.

See which is most convenient for you.

(I think I read that Excel 2007 changes the behaviour of F4 so that
it only copies over one part of a formatting element (e.g. only
border colour or fill colour, not both at once). This would actually
be useful behaviour if it could be chosen, since I often want to
change all my borders to grey, say, but not make all the fill colours
of the bars I'm selecting be the same. As it is, the change will just
annoy those who liked the old way, and add inconsistency across
versions, without giving much benefit)

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to ,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

Take a look at the Chart Assistant at
http://www.add-ins.com/chart_assistant.htm.

Bob Flanagan
Macro Systems
http://www.add-ins.com
Productivity add-ins and downloadable books on VB macros for Excel

"ccinseward" wrote in message
...
I have numerous charts that will eventually be copied into Powerpoint. I
want
to edit all of them at one time to have the same formatting. When I choose
more than one chart, the formatting for the charts is not available. This
is
very frustrating as now I will have to change each segment of each chart.
Is
there a way to choose multiple charts and edit them or am I barking up a
very
empty tree?

(I think I read that Excel 2007 changes the behaviour of F4 so that
it only copies over one part of a formatting element (e.g. only
border colour or fill colour, not both at once). This would actually
be useful behaviour if it could be chosen, since I often want to
change all my borders to grey, say, but not make all the fill colours
of the bars I'm selecting be the same. As it is, the change will just
annoy those who liked the old way, and add inconsistency across
versions, without giving much benefit)

That's unfortunately true about Excel 2007, just one more way to force more
mouse clicking.

If you want this degree of customization, it's probably a one-off exercise,
so you might as well record a macro, remove all but the lines that make the
changes you need, run the macro on all charts, then delete the macro.

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