Excel VBA 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition

Lesson 17Programming Charts

When I started to program Excel in the early 1990s, I remember being impressed with the charting tools that came with Excel. They were very good back then, and today's chart features in Excel are downright awesome, rivaling—and usually surpassing—the charting packages of any software application.

Because you are reading this book, chances are pretty good that you've manually created your share of charts in Excel using the Chart Wizard or by selecting a chart type from the dozens of choices on the Ribbon. You might also have played with the Macro Recorder to do some automation of chart creation. This lesson takes you past the Macro Recorder's capabilities to show how to create and manipulate embedded charts and chart sheets.

The topic of charting is one that can, and does, fill entire books. The myriad chart types and features that Excel makes available to you goes well beyond the scope of this lesson. What this lesson does is show you the syntaxes for several methods that work for embedded charts and chart sheets, with a few different features and chart types represented in the programming code. From the VBA examples in this lesson, you can expand your chart programming skills by substituting the chart types and features shown for others that may be more suited to the kinds of charts you want to develop.

NOTE In the examples, you might notice that the charts being created are declared as a Chart type object variable, which makes it easier to refer ...