Chapter 18: Working with Charts
IN THIS CHAPTER
• Discovering essential background information on Excel charts
• Knowing the difference between embedded charts and chart sheets
• Understanding the Chart object model
• Using methods other than the macro recorder to help you learn about Chart objects
• Exploring examples of common charting tasks that use VBA
• Navigating more complex charting macros
• Finding out some interesting (and useful) chart-making tricks
• Working with Sparkline charts
Getting the Inside Scoop on Charts
Excel's charting feature lets you create a wide variety of charts using data that's stored in a worksheet. You have a great deal of control over nearly every aspect of each chart.
An Excel chart is simply packed with objects, each of which has its own properties and methods. Because of this, manipulating charts with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) can be a bit of a challenge. In this chapter, I discuss the key concepts that you need to understand in order to write VBA code that generates or manipulates charts. The secret, as you'll see, is a good understanding of the object hierarchy for charts.
Excel 2010 includes a new feature called Sparklines. A Sparkline is a small chart contained in a cell. The Sparklines feature uses an entirely separate object model than charts. I cover this feature in this chapter.
Chart locations
In Excel, a chart can be located ...
