Line and Fill Effects in Excel Charts Using VBA.Excel charts offer a wide variety of formats, but you can use Excel's drawing tools to enable even more formatting choices. It's possible to draw shapes on the chart to produce these formats, using the polygon drawing tool. This allows more line formats, by enabling more choices of line thickness and by making it easier to read dashed lines. More fill possibilities are made possible than merely filling below a series, as in an area chart: the fill can go below or to the side of the series, and in fact, an enclosed region in the chart can be filled. The fill can be made transparent too, allowing gridlines to show through the shape.
This article presents VBA procedures that automate the polygon drawing tool, and gives hints about the kinds of formatting which may be achieved. A sample procedure has been recently added to show how to use this technique for charts that have multiple series. |
