Just want to thank you for your great website. Keep up with the good work.

Even scientists and engineers should be flexible enough to get the swapping of dependent and independent axes, and in fact, they would probably understand more quickly that the vertical axis in a horizontal bar chart is the X axis in an Excel chart.

Of course, a bar or column chart is generally inappropriate for most scientific or engineering charts, eh?

Excel 2007 uses new shapes for the elements of its charts. Development of these new shapes was finished late in the process of finishing Office 2007, and there was not time to incorporate them into the macro recorder. When you record a macro involving shapes, the recorder misses everything, and when a recorded macro deals with charts, it misses almost all formatting. There is enough compatibility with previous versions that code recorded in 2003 will (mostly) work in 2007, and the formatting code in 2003 will still produce thee equivalent formatting in 2007.

Actually, I had tried to record the macro to format both axes. This is is how it turned out:

Sub Macro6()
‘ Macro6 Macro
ActiveSheet.ChartObjects(”Chart 1″).Activate
ActiveChart.Axes(xlValue).Select
ActiveSheet.ChartObjects(”Chart 1″).Activate
ActiveSheet.ChartObjects(”Chart 1″).Activate
ActiveChart.Axes(xlCategory).Select
End Sub

Is there a setting that I’ve got turned off that causes the macro recorder to miss internal operations once the Axes(xlValue) is selected? Or is this just a quirk of Excel 2007?

Best regards, Jim

Whenever I get stuck, or I’m too lazy to consult the object Browser, I record a macro:

Sub Macro1()
'
' Macro1 Macro
' Macro recorded 10/23/2008 by Jon Peltier
'

'
    ActiveChart.Axes(xlValue).Select
    Selection.TickLabels.AutoScaleFont = True
    With Selection.TickLabels.Font
        .Name = "Arial"
        .FontStyle = "Regular"
        .Size = 8
        .Strikethrough = False
        .Superscript = False
        .Subscript = False
        .OutlineFont = False
        .Shadow = False
        .Underline = xlUnderlineStyleNone
        .ColorIndex = xlAutomatic
        .Background = xlAutomatic
    End With
End Sub
 

This can be cleaned up:

Sub ResizeAxisTickFont()
' Macro cleaned up 10/23/2008 by Jon Peltier

    With ActiveChart.Axes(xlValue).TickLabels.Font
        .Size = 8
    End With
End Sub
 

Thanks for your very helpful blogs. I have been trying to write code for re-formatting charts. I’ve been battling trying to work out how to change the font size of the axes numbers (xlValue and xlCategory). I would have thought that something like this might have worked:

ActiveChart.Axes(xlValue).Select
With Selection.Font
.Size = 8
End With

Have you got any ideas on how the font size can be changed?

Jim