Comments on: What happened to my favorite Excel 2003 Chart feature?

By: ChemEngr Mike

ChemEngr Mike — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 03:09:41 +0000

If Microsoft reckons that the ability to directly manipulate of data points is a rarely used feature they cannot have consulted many engineers. I too use this feature a lot for turning all sorts of graphical data into numerical so I can use the trend line equation for further calculations. I’ll be lost when my company decides to “upgrade” from 2003.

By: Grzegorz Piotrowski

Grzegorz Piotrowski — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:23:27 +0000

I also struggle with the XY Scalar charts created in E2003 that on opening them in E2010 change their size. The dots in chart were replaced with autoshapes (arrows). Now some of them have original size in 2010 and some not. What is most frustrating about it is lack of consequence. I tried everything to no avail. Looks like the plot area in 2010 changes sometimes for no reason. In E2003 everything all arrows are identical and in 2010 they differ.

Has anyone come across similar issue?

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 23:07:23 +0000

Roger -

I used to do this routinely in Excel 2003, but it doesn’t work the same in 2007, and I haven’t had time (or motivation, really) to figure it out.

By: Roger

Roger — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:06:25 +0000

I would like to resize a chart to fill up a printed page by decreasing the page margins and adjusting scaling. Am I missing something? Why isn’t this an option. Is there a work around?

By: Harry

Harry — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:08:03 +0000

Direct manipulation of datapoints is a function that engineers and scientists need for calibrating and smoothen data, adjust models and optimise systems.

I’m pretty sure that ANY engineering company in the world, using excel, is significantly affected by removing this feature. Most must be wondering what got into their heads at microsoft.

For an engineer there is no really useful new feature in excel 2007. There is STILL no real 3D-chart function that graphs data correctly respecting axis spacings that are irregular…and still no decent 2D or 3D table interpolation function…

Probably they only asked the financial world for input to get to what 2007 is…I must use matlab now to do my work…

Hope that they release a special engineering version for the next release that would be a big step forward!

By: Andreas

Andreas — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:23:10 +0000

Direct manipulation of data points on charts – a great functionality. Removing it – not so great.

And I can only agree with you Jon: “Perhaps the biggest mistake Microsoft made with Excel 2007 was violating the maxim: Don’t ever reduce functionality and flexibility with an “upgrade”.”

Now I think that a bunch of open source alternatives have the edge, even if one has to do a little programming before up and running…