Found another chart bug while running my 3800-line data visualization
Excel/VBA program today. In the course of six years fiddling with VBA in
Excel, I've concluded that programmatic acess to charts is by far the biggest
source of trouble in Excel/VBA programming. Since I can't find any other
Internet-based venue for submission of bugs to Microsoft, I'll post this bug
here. But first, I'll share a few of my other discoveries of weird chart
behavior, so that others will not be driven to beat their heads against their
desks as I have done.

Tip 1:
The size in screen coordinates of axis titles is incorrect until the axes
are actually drawn on-screen. This means that screen updating must be
enabled before getting these sizes.

Tip 2 (the Golden Rule):
You can't work with chart series if the series is not visible (as is the
case if the linked cells are all empty, for example). Golden rule: set
chart.DisplayBlanksAs=xlZero before changing the datasets of a chart series.

Tip 3:
In general, you can't programmatically access chart elements that can not be
displayed (for example, you can't set the title of a completely empty chart).

Tip 4:
When moving the PlotArea within the ChartArea (by setting position of the
top left corner), don't allow the bottom or left edges of the PlotArea to be
moved outside the confines of the ChartArea. If you try, an error will be
raised.

And now, today's bug. When applying a Name to a ChartObject, strange things
happen if that name contains any punctuation except for the underscore, or
contains certain, but not all, of the extended ASCII characters, or contains
a space. If you provide such a name then you will find that that particular
chart is NOT RETURNED when iterating over the ChartObjects collection by
using the For Each mechamism, even though ChartObjects.Count will show the
correct number of charts. In fact, in a running program,you can add a watch
on ChartObjects, expand it, and see that Count is correct, whereas the listed
Chart nodes will be missing the ones that were assigned names as described
above. The solution is to address each chart by its index, using
Chartobjects.Count and a traditional For loop. Very weird.

Okay, one more bug workaround I'm dying to share. When pasting Office
tables, charts, graphics, etc. as metafiles, one often finds that colored
text, and certain other colored graphical elements, are shown as black in the
pasted metafile graphic. Fix this problem by pretending to print to a color
printer before doing the cut and paste (go through the print dialogs,
selecting a color printer, then cancel the print dialog).

Thanks,
Dave