Integrating Excel and Access

Building a Regular Chart

While pivot charts are very useful, sometimes you want to chart data using a regular chart, or you do not want your users pivoting the data. In these cases, you have a couple of choices. You can, of course, build the chart manually each time you need it. You can also build the chart manually and use automation from Access to push in updated data. If you're feeling ambitious, you can use VBA to build the chart from scratch.

If you already have a good chart, I recommend saving and opening it, using it as a template, and just changing the data. However, sometimes this is not practical, or you might not want to rely on having an Excel file available. Also, sometimes clients want a generic charting tool run from Access where they can choose the data they want and have it created in a chart. In cases like that, you have to build the chart each time with VBA.

To demonstrate building a chart with VBA, let's start with the data we exported earlier. Assume that you want to show the number of units and total sales of each product in one chart and total sales by location in another—on two axes on the first chart and one axis on the other. You can do this with two Group By queries; select the text fields as Group By and select Quantity and/or TotalCost using Sum as the function. For Example 6-4, the queries are saved as qry_SalesbyProduct and qry_SalesbyCenter.

Example 6-4. Chart from scratch example

Public Sub BuildCharts() Dim xlApp As Excel.Application Dim xlwb As Excel.Workbook ...