I don’t think that functions were arbitrarily disallowed from text element formula links. I think these links were intended to be just that: links. Charts themselves are not responsible for many calculations, other than figuring out positions and sizes of the various chart elements. It is up to the spreadsheet designer to provide the appropriate text in the linked cell, by functions or other means.

Jon (or anyone else), do you have any feeling on the reason MS decided to arbitrarily disallow use of functions in those text box formulas?

In my particular case at the moment, it’s a pivotchart.
It’s not like it serves to limit the computation that a graph update can require–relative to using an intermediary cell, that is–in fact it should increase it marginally. (If that were the motive, they would’ve also prevented such an obvious work-around by preventing re-evaluation of any cell referenced by a text box in a chart.)

So if it’s not about computation involved in refreshing,… my best guess would be that it’s something about not wanting to deal with some would-be implication of having formula located anywhere but cells. (Or are there already formulas outside cells?)

Any thoughts?

Worked beautifully. Thank you very much. Part of my trouble was that I am using two charts on one chart sheet and Excel won’t let me click on the axis and assign it to a cell. I can do that if there is a single chart on the chart sheet, but not if I have two chart objects embedded. Not really sure why that is.

Man, my charts have come a long way since discovering this excellent resource. Thanks for all you do. I’m glad that the one person who knows everything about Excel charts is willing to share.

The code only works for shapes. I added the code because the old way of selecting the shape and entering a formula in the formula bar doesn’t work in 2007. The manual way of adding linked labels to other chart text elements works as in 2003.

This code programmatically links the X and Y axis titles to cells:

ActiveChart.Axes(xlCategory).AxisTitle.Text = “=Sheet1!R2C1″
ActiveChart.Axes(xlValue).AxisTitle.Text = “=Sheet1!R2C2″

It wouldn’t be too bad if I could record a macro, but I’m using 2007 and it ignores moste verything I do with charts. What I’m really after is VBA code to set an axis title formula to reference a cell. Any suggestions? Impossible?

If you have done this and it still isn’t working, I don’t know why, because I haven’t had this problem.

Thks for your reply

That was of course my first idea, but it happened not to work with names because of an added space at the end… very weird…
If I well remember, it works well with normal reference (=A1)

I don’t know why it works, either, or why the trailing space should matter. Perhaps something as simple as

shp.DrawingObject.Formula = shp.DrawingObject.Formula
 

is all that’s really needed.