Comments on: Arranging Charts in a Grid

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:51:36 +0000

Derek – I use the shift-select trick a lot. You actually get a more accurate copy-paste than copying the chart area: when you copy the chart area and paste it, sometimes the pasted chart is a pixel wider and taller. Also, there’s a strange glitch when the window is at a lower resolution than 100%. Copy a chart at 50%, then paste it, and the pasted chart is half the size of the original. Shift-selecting before copying avoids this.

When I shift-select a chart, then copy it and paste it into PowerPoint, I am still getting an embedded workbook. I just tested it before shooting my mouth off….

And I have VBA solutions for the plot area size variations. In fact, here’s a semi-documented, semi-functional version:
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Zips/AlignChartDimensions.zip

By: derek

derek — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:28:42 +0000

I knew about snapping them to the grid, and I like the sound of a VBA routine, but I’ve recently found that shift-clicking on one embedded chart, or clicking on more than one, treats them like pictures, with all the facilities that implies. You can tell this has happened when the drag handles are white, not black. This means I can select a number of charts and type the size in manually in Format Object, and they’ll all have the same size. Then I can use the Draw toolbar to align and distribute them, just like Powerpoint objects or Autoshapes.

(it also means they cut and paste into other applications as pictures and not embedded spreadsheets, which is a useful alternative to Copy Special)

An annoying feature of Excel is that the actual plot area is less easy to control than the whole graph area, so the graph areas align but the plot areas, the bit the readers actually see and expect to align, do not. That can sometimes be mitigated by careful choice of axis label formats and legends.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:48:41 +0000

Tony -

Thanks. I have another one in the works, which starts with a table, and produces one chart per row of data. But the site went down, actually it was suspended for an as-yet unexplained reason, and I spent too much time running around reinstating the site.

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:24:24 +0000

Nice post Jon! I use this setup, often called ’small multiples’ as coined by Edward Tufte, and this is definitely a helpful tip. I can confirm that doing this manually is tedious. Keep ‘em coming!