You’ve given me a few ideas. I can certainly implement a few shortcut keys so I’m not relying on clicks on the chart. I could also fake a toolbar with a small modal dialog so mouse users will have a means to make these changes. There’s always room for a redesign, I guess.

Web browsers use ALT+Left and ALT+Right to go forward and back through the history and applications use CTRL+Z and CTRL+Y to move through Undo/Redo history. I feel like I’ve gotten used to using keyboard shortcuts like this for navigation. ALT+TAB, ALT+SHIFT+TAB and CTRL+TAB, CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to navigate windows or tabs is another good example (and CTRL+PGUP/PGDN for worksheets).

Now if you could make use of scroll wheel (or maybe ALT+Scrollwheel) to mimic the zoom behavior that CTRL+scrollwheel has in most applications, that could be very helpful. Middle Click and Drag would be cool too for selecting or panning. Another random thought would be to use the Forward and Back buttons (Buttons 4 and 5) on many mouses these days, but of course that is very restricting. CTRL+> and CTRL+< are used by several Office apps now to change font size up and down.

So if you had to use keyboard shortcuts to move backward and forward in zoom history, what about “CTRL+SHIFT+=” and “CTRL+SHIFT+-” (basically CTRL+SHIFT and the plus and minus keys). These shortcuts are already used by Microsoft Word for superscript and subscript and though I sincerely wish they were used that way in Excel, they aren’t. The plus and minus aspect correlates with the concept of zooming in and out. CTRL+0 could then be used to reset to the default (in Firefox, CTRL+0 resets the zoom level to 100%) and CTRL+SHIFT+0 or “CTRL+)” could be used for tightly bounding the data.

Just some thoughts! I really like the idea of giving added dynamic capabilities to the charts in Excel similar to what MATLAB and other packages have. Several mouse clicks and manual number entries later is a horrible way to update the view of a graphical interface. That’s almost like making a powerpoint from commandline…

This was with both an embedded and a chart sheet.

Did you do this in a chart sheet or in an embedded chart? ISTR that these events fire in a chart sheet, but it’s not too useful. In 2003 you could size the chart to the window, and the X-Y coordinates you got were useful, based on offsets from the top left of the window. In a chart sheet which is not sized to window, which is all of them in 2007, the X-Y coordinates you get are still from the top left corner of the window, but I can’t figure out how to tell how much gray area there is around the chart, or where the user may have scrolled.

I fooled around a bit with a simple chart class and with a click/drag/release all three events fired in both 2003 and 2007, except that in both versions the up event doesn’t fire in the chart area, but it does in the plot area.

The other thing is that with a touchpad the up/down events fire if I tap in one place without dragging, but only the move events fire if I tap/drag/release.

LOL!!!