Comments on: Label Each Series in a Chart

By: Brian Murphy

Brian Murphy — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:46:14 +0000

I’m also finding that excel 2010 does not have this problem with datalabel positions! In fact, excel 2010 runs my chart intensive macros way faster than excel 2007. Not as fast as excel 2003, but close. Excel 2010 does choke badly, though, when putting data point symbols on just 10 or 20 points of a series with a few thousand points (i.e. sparse symbols).

Brian

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:29:33 +0000

Brian -

Yeah, so much of 2007′s chart system is undercooked.

I’ve had lots of issues with labeling in 2007. Some of the issues are avoided by inserting DoEvents here and there. Selecting labels makes them somewhat more reliable, and I think there are other tricks. Unfortunately, most measures that improve reliability also make your code run excruciatingly slowly. I’ve even had to insert a progress bar dialog so the user sees that the code is still running.

By: Brian Murphy

Brian Murphy — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:39:43 +0000

It’s been my experience that in an xy scatter chart

With .Points(iLabel).DataLabel
.Top = somenumber

can cause a r/t error in excel 2007 unless the datalabel is first .Selected

Has this ever happened to you? The errors I get are the .Top method fails or else overflow. Sometimes going into Debug at the error and pressing F5 continues anyway. Simply .Selecting the datalabel first seems to eliminate the problem.

Brian Murphy

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:37:33 +0000

Things should be as simple as possible, no simpler.
Neil, in my humble opinion, your solution is simple. Jon’s is elegant. AND simple.

Amature VBA people might learn some valuabale lessons from Jon’s code, such as writing simple code that doesn’t have things hard-coded. Your code only works on a chart called DoughnutChart sitting in a worksheet called PowerpointTableTemplates with 4 data series.

While your code works fine under these limits, Jon’s handles any, and is more visually appealing to boot…his code centres the labels perfectly right smack in the middle of each series.

Your statement “My solution is simpler to understand for amateur VBA people such as myself, thats what i meant by ‘simple’.” I interpret as My solution is simpler [for me] to understand , thats what i meant by ‘simple’. “

By: neil clarke

neil clarke — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:57:20 +0000

My solution is simpler to understand for amateur VBA people such as myself, thats what i meant by ‘simple’.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 03:09:53 +0000

Hmm, my method uses only a dozen or so lines of code, accommodates a variable number of data labels, does not require changing the chart type, and has no errors to debug. I’d say it’s pretty simple.