I have seen routines to adjust the positions of individual labels until there is no overlap, but these have been rudimentary, and I cannot locate the specific one I’m thinking of on the author’s web site.

You can position the data labels manually: click once to select the series of labels, and a second time to select the individual label, then drag it into position. It is not easy to control the position closely using the mouse. Rob Bovey’s Chart Labeler has a feature that gives you closer control over positioning of data labels.

For the xy chart, I think it would be very nice to avoid the labels overlapping. I copied some vba code for attaching labels to the xy chart, but came with the same problem about overlapping. I was wondering whether you know how to solve it, and would be very grateful if you could share it.

If you and your lawyer friend Ken don’t mind, perhaps I could write about that macro some day. It’s not a complex topic, well, not for someone who has been around Excel and VBA as long as I have, but it’s a good way to discuss more uses of Excel and VBA together.

Nixnut -

I was suspecting that Naomi was using a select-the-point-and-paste approach, but I was thinking about something that used a bar chart and an XY point with a custom marker where the arrowhead goes. This keeps the shape of each arrowhead consistent despite the changing lengths of the arrows.

I’ve written VBA procedures that create a chart, plot X and Y based on two fields in a data set, then adjust a shape according to one or more additional fields, and apply the shape to the chart. I’ve done this to illustrate a vector field, that is, an array of arrows which have varying length and orientation. I’ve used it to make custom bubble charts, where the bubble is something too complex to render in a simple bubble chart (like a pie chart, but don’t tell anyone).

I did this the first time I used arrows and then Ken Klein, a brilliant lawyer who knows more about Excel than most Excel gurus, generalized what I did and wrote a macro for me to use in the future. Anyone who wants a copy of the macro can send an email to me at naomi at nbr-graphs.com.