Comment from Bob
Time: Monday, October 20, 2008, 8:08 am

We are going to upgrade to office 2007 from 2003.
In some cases, such as Project 2003 -> 2007 it will be incremental, but Excel 2007 charts and the ribbon UI are a concern for me.

I hope I can keep 2003.

Pingback from 14 Misconceptions About Charts and Graphs | Jorge Camoes’ Charts
Time: Monday, October 20, 2008, 9:10 am

[...] to use Excel 2007 charts to post images in this blog. He doesn’t agree and he tries to prove in his last post that charts in Excel 2003 are actually better. He uses good examples to prove his point but I [...]

Comment from Jorge Camoes
Time: Monday, October 20, 2008, 9:24 am

Jon, I actually paid for this thing, it must worth something…

As I said, I only use Excel 2007 to create images for the blog, and I do think that usually the chart looks better (depending on the formatting). I’ve updated the post to add a small example. I do have some issues when opening an Excel 2003 file in Excel 2007, so I always check if the chart needs editing.

By the way, you have been creating a great resource for people to see through the marketing fog, and help people to better evaluate the two versions. Thanks!

Comment from Noah
Time: Monday, October 20, 2008, 9:36 am

These are pretty weak arguments against Excel 2007 charts. Very thin lines will always appear “fuzzy” when antialiasing and even fuzzier when compared to jagged pixelated lines. The 2003 lines look old and dated while the 2007 ones look much better.

Comment from John
Time: Monday, October 20, 2008, 7:46 pm

Invaluable discussion for those of us who have not proceeded too far down the dark mineshafts of Excel 2007 yet (Lordy! And we’re almost through 2008!). I’m inclined to agree that anti-aliased vs broken lines is a matter of personal choice and that may depend on application. IMO the best option would be to have a choice.

Completely behind Jon re less flexibility. Half the highly productive tweaks in 2003 seem to have come from unintentional design gaps (what IBM used to call “features”) in 2003. Programmers would have done better to check with experienced users before fixing these.

Comment from Chandoo
Time: Tuesday, October 21, 2008, 9:39 am

I kind of like the antialiased look of the charts in 2007. For the same reasons I like clear type text (and reading on mac) more than windows. Although we may argue that anti-aliasing smoothens that chart and thus ruins that crisp look, actually that is what happens when you print a chart (both 2003 and 2007). In prints the charts are more or less smooth.

But again as you say, it is a matter of personal preference.

Btw, I am still on 2003, I guess my days of using 2003 are numbered.

Comment from Grant Case
Time: Wednesday, October 22, 2008, 9:53 pm

Jon,

I can understand both viewpoints as I spend my day in both 2003 and 2007 (as a business user not a developer). I can say that this is probably one of the things I worry least about in 2007, but I love your idea of putting together a longer version of the article detailing all of Excel 2007 Charts failings. If we could even kinda of go Wiki with it I think that would be even better. As someone who makes his living doing data analysis in financial services, Microsoft seriously handicapped my productivity when it redesigned the charting engine. I think we have a right to be angry and a duty to make our views known to Redmond. When there are individuals building full Sparklines functionality into Excel through open source and doing more for Excel charting then Microsoft did in all of Excel 2007, then we must do something.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sparklinesforxl/

After having read the Excel developers blog for the last year I understand why 2007 s**ks so bad, it seems they’re more interested in trying to get Excel to work on the web then actually making it better for the rest of us.

On a related note, Microsoft must have only user tested 2007 with people who little to no knowledge of Excel. No one that I am aware of in the financial services industry has made the move to 2007 nor do they plan too because of what’s been done to Excel. Many traders, bankers, and analysts would literally throw the computer out the window if they had to deal with 2007 and after now working with it for over 6 months I can’t say that I would blame them.

Wanna make Excel pretty for Grandma, fine – make it push button friendly and let her type in her contact list. But don’t expect the guy who is trying to complete a merger valuation at 3:00 in the morning to relearn a program that he was an expert in. There is no chance Microsoft took this application into any investment bank because they would have screamed bloody murder. Maybe for this next iteration they will try to get power users involved in the business requirement solicitation and user testing.

Comment from Fabrice
Time: Thursday, October 23, 2008, 9:06 am

John, Grant,

I fully agree. “keep it simple” should be the key word.

Developers, like any professional, will do their best and demonstrate their ability to be creative ; add more new features ; with more colors and 3D glowing spinning flashy effects…. because it’s cool

When users the want fewer things that work fine.

Definitely, plethora of features is not the solution :
it is hard to organize them, complicated to fit them in a tool bar (even on a Ribbon) and final users will only use 10% of them in most cases.

Development teams should definitely include more users (not designers nor programmers… just advanced users) that are able to express (and defend) their needs, temper the enthusiasm of coders…

Stick to core needs, improve usability before adding features.
Make efficient tools, not cool tools

But we all know that, isn’t it

Comment from Chris
Time: Monday, October 27, 2008, 9:38 am

Jon,

Firstly, great site, great info.

I’m about to make the leap into the world of 2007, so I think antialiasing is the least of my worries. For the first time last night I opened one of my ‘every day’ files in 2007 and the charts I saw were rendered completely incorrectly. It was late, so I just closed it and pretended everything was ok.

At the moment I’m trying to find a way of having 2003 & 2007 on the same machine simultaneously, but I don’t think there’s a ‘clean’ way.

I think I’ll have to go head first.

Comment from Chris
Time: Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 5:11 am

Thanks for the tip Jon, I think I’ll avoid the simultaneous installations and stick 2003 on a virtual machine.

Comment from fabrice
Time: Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 6:41 am

Jon,

I found a recent survey you might be interested in, on Excel French site ” http://www.excel-downloads.com/” regarding Excel versions

Out of 3324 answers between 06/13/2008 au 08/31/2008 :

1 – Excel 2003 : 44,9%
2 – Excel 2007 : 30,6%
3 – Excel 2000 : 7,6%
4 – Excel XP : 5,9%
5 – Excel 97 : 4%
6 – Excel 2004 MAC : 3,1%
7 – Excel 2002 : 2,9%
8 – Others : 0,9%

Rgards

Comment from Rene Tenazas
Time: Friday, January 16, 2009, 12:06 pm

Jon,

This might be a late comment, but I have a problem with Excel 2007 charts that no one else seems to have brought up. If I create a chart in Excel 2007 and save it in a .xls file under compatibility mode, then give that chart to someone with Excel 2000 or Excel 2003, they cannot see the entire chart. The legend or y-axis text is cropped/truncated.

It appears that the “compatibility mode” of Excel 2007 is not really compatible with earlier versions of Excel. For that reason, I do not use 2007 to create charts that I intend to share with others using earlier Excel versions. Am I the only one with this kind of problem?

Rene

Comment from John
Time: Tuesday, April 7, 2009, 4:25 pm

I agree with the banker guy. I own a small SW company that mines data from data historians using Excel. We might look at 1000 variables going back 9 months every 4 minutes. We even have a feature to automatically create a PowerPoint file using Excel graphs (creates slides and charts based on statitistical signficance). I would say I have never met another Excel addin that does more than ours does. So I would definitely characterize us as power users. That said, 2007 is a disaster – why did MS change the graph object model without telling anyone? If you have code to manipulate graph objects, get ready for problems when you switch to 2007. Who cares about fuzzy lines? There are much larger issues out there, like the graph object model. Here is another pet peeve: in 2003 when you hover over a series, it gives you the x,y values. In 2007 you have to select the series? WHY?

The only thing worse than 2007 is 2007 on Vista. Every try and drag an object in a Webex session? It locks up your PC – totally. Nice job, MS.

Comment from Sherri
Time: Thursday, June 11, 2009, 3:07 pm

I’ve got a related issue (I think). We have some computers with 2003 and some with 2007. None of the charts are showing up when I open the 2003 created workbook in 2007. Any fix you’re aware of? I’m currently trying to reprogram the charts in a 2007 workbook, but I agree with you – they are way fuzzy looking – not the crisp look I’m used to in prior versions. (add that all to the fact that the Excel 2003 file locks up my Excel for ages trying to open!).

Comment from DRamsey
Time: Monday, January 11, 2010, 4:59 pm

Why am I only able to print out 1 or 2 graph charts from my excel 2003 workbook when I am in excel 2007? It is really frustrating.
Thank you.

Comment from Chart Presentation
Time: Friday, January 15, 2010, 3:30 am

can I easily past a chart from excel into ppt as an enhancend metafile WITHOUT going through the paste special or atl-e-s-…etc methods? Like, say, a quick bar button?