Microsoft® Word 2007 Bible

Chapter 23. Charts

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Office 2007 Charts

• Office 2007 Charts versus Microsoft Graph

• Chart templates

• Chart design, layout, and formatting

Off the charts? In uncharted territory? Maybe. Office 2007's new chart features certainly expand the boundaries, frontiers, and horizons of how you can visually present data. Office 2007 provides a gallery of over 71 charts that look pretty darn nifty even before you add your touch.

As if that isn't enough, there are galleries of chart layouts, chart styles, backgrounds, labels, shapes, and other effects you can apply to tweak your charts to perfection. When you get everything looking exactly as you want it, you can save it as a template for next time.

Sound good? It is, but there's a slight catch. The new and improved chart capabilities don't really belong to Word. They belong to Excel 2007. Excel is quite generous and will let you use its capabilities in Word or in PowerPoint, but you do need to have Excel 2007. Without Excel, you can still do charts, but they're not nearly as fancy and cool as what you can achieve if you have Excel.

In this chapter, we'll look Office 2007's powerful new charting capabilities, but we'll also take a quick look at what might be the best argument ever for investing in a version of Office 2007 that includes Excel—Microsoft Graph.

Excel or Microsoft Graph

When you hover the mouse over Chart in the Insert ribbon, as shown in Figure 23.1, the initial look suggests that you're on the precipice of yet another impressive ...