Chart items moving around
 

Hi everybody!
I have posted this before but I never got any replies so I did some testing
myself. I I want to share what I have found out with you and it would be
great to hear if someone else recognizes this.

Background:
I have a number of embedded charts on a scorecard sheet that gets updated
from several sources. I run this scorecard for different business units, take
pictures of the scorecards and put in another Excel file that I later make a
PDF of.

Problem: After running this a few times, I find that my chart legends have
moved around a bit and that some plot areas have been resized.

Solution: I have two macros. One that saves information about size and
postion of chart elements, which I run once when I have set up the charts as
I want them, and one that reformats the charts according to the saved
information, which I run after each run of the scorecard.

My findings: This seem to happen for charts where the legend is not at a
default placement (top, bottom, left, right, corner) and the chart is
automatically reformatted due to new data (or simply when you zoom in and out
a few times).

Am I doing something wrong here or is this a bug?
(I'm using Excel 2003. Try this by creating a simple chart and move the
legend manually, then zoom in and out a couple of times and see if the legend
has moved.)

/Marcus

Marcus,

Something to try...
In the "format chart area" dialog box, on the "font" tab, uncheck "auto scale"

Regards,
Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA


"Marcus Langell" wrote in message
...
Hi everybody!
I have posted this before but I never got any replies so I did some testing
myself. I I want to share what I have found out with you and it would be
great to hear if someone else recognizes this.

Background:
I have a number of embedded charts on a scorecard sheet that gets updated
from several sources. I run this scorecard for different business units, take
pictures of the scorecards and put in another Excel file that I later make a
PDF of.

Problem: After running this a few times, I find that my chart legends have
moved around a bit and that some plot areas have been resized.

Solution: I have two macros. One that saves information about size and
postion of chart elements, which I run once when I have set up the charts as
I want them, and one that reformats the charts according to the saved
information, which I run after each run of the scorecard.

My findings: This seem to happen for charts where the legend is not at a
default placement (top, bottom, left, right, corner) and the chart is
automatically reformatted due to new data (or simply when you zoom in and out
a few times).

Am I doing something wrong here or is this a bug?
(I'm using Excel 2003. Try this by creating a simple chart and move the
legend manually, then zoom in and out a couple of times and see if the legend
has moved.)

/Marcus

Thanks, but that does not solve it. (You can test the effect by creating an
embedded chart, move the legend manually and zoom in and out a few times.
You'll find that the legend is not at the place where you originally put it,
regardless of the font setting.)

/Marcus



"Jim Cone" wrote:

Marcus,

Something to try...
In the "format chart area" dialog box, on the "font" tab, uncheck "auto scale"

Regards,
Jim Cone
San Francisco, USA


"Marcus Langell" wrote in message
...
Hi everybody!
I have posted this before but I never got any replies so I did some testing
myself. I I want to share what I have found out with you and it would be
great to hear if someone else recognizes this.

Background:
I have a number of embedded charts on a scorecard sheet that gets updated
from several sources. I run this scorecard for different business units, take
pictures of the scorecards and put in another Excel file that I later make a
PDF of.

Problem: After running this a few times, I find that my chart legends have
moved around a bit and that some plot areas have been resized.

Solution: I have two macros. One that saves information about size and
postion of chart elements, which I run once when I have set up the charts as
I want them, and one that reformats the charts according to the saved
information, which I run after each run of the scorecard.

My findings: This seem to happen for charts where the legend is not at a
default placement (top, bottom, left, right, corner) and the chart is
automatically reformatted due to new data (or simply when you zoom in and out
a few times).

Am I doing something wrong here or is this a bug?
(I'm using Excel 2003. Try this by creating a simple chart and move the
legend manually, then zoom in and out a couple of times and see if the legend
has moved.)

/Marcus

I think the answer is to follow Jim Cone's suggestion, but also not change the Zoom settings. I wrote a suite of routines to do a similar thing (roll-in different sets of data into the same chart source, then copy/paste as metafile the chart), but I wrote into the routine to always set the source sheet zoom to 100 whenever run, so that even if the user changed the zoom, it wouldn't cause that problem.

BizMark