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" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
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" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
> 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


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BizMark