Comments on: Excel 2007 Chart Performance – Revisited

By: David Gobbett

David Gobbett — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 04:28:46 +0000

After quite some time searching the net and messing around in Excel, I finally found a workaround to this problem, which I now see is also mentioned above (if only I had seen that earlier…). Setting the Marker Options to Built-in (e.g. simple x) prevents the slow (sometimes looping) redraws of a chart with 3 series of 9000+ points and the performance becomes quite satisfactory.

By: Chris Wharton

Chris Wharton — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:05:02 +0000

Excel 2007 seems to have a problem with chart events. The VBA code you wrote in GetXYonAnyChart does not work in 2007

By: Dmitry Kolosov

Dmitry Kolosov — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:18:58 +0000

Not only is Excel 2007 notoriously slow when it comes to drawing the charts.
Too often I see it redrawing a chart in an infinite loop!
I have a Scatter chart with 18000 points. If I scroll the page so that the chart goes out of view and then scroll it back – Excel redraws the chart (it takes 8 seconds on my Dual-i7 with 4G RAM) – then immediately redraws it again, and again, and again – infinitely

By: Mr. Kariranta

Mr. Kariranta — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:18:00 +0000

Yep, I noticed that and also that it is possible put your own chart template with x- and +-markers as a default chart style – tried that and it initially seems to make the graph making bearable, I’ll at least try to work that way for a day or two and postpone the decision of downgrading.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 25 May 2010 20:26:33 +0000

Mr K -

You can format a chart with the markers and colors you need, then save it as a user-defined style. This style can then be applied to new or existing charts.

By: Mr. Kariranta

Mr. Kariranta — Tue, 25 May 2010 15:31:46 +0000

Thanks for your informative page!

I was just starting processing work of a huge set of measurements for my Masters thesis with X2007 when i noticed the problem with the drawing of charts. So then I was almost upgrading my HW with some memory and graphics card when I found your page and the real reason for the problems.

At the moment I have some 12000 data rows and I typically use 3-5 columns for my graphs and the working was just horrible when the screen draw the data points every time I even touched the graph.

I tried the hint of using X and + markers and it truly helps, the slowness is away, but I’m no way going to change the markers separately for each graph, it is just unnecessary and annoying thing to do when you have to produce large series of graphs specially as everything works fine with older versions. Or does someone know how you could change the markers to x or + by default?