J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Chart Changes Chronicled

Microsoft answers the question: What happened to my favorite charting features?

The improvements to charts in Office Excel 2007 were dramatic. You can now use the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface ribbon to create professional-looking charts with special effects, such as realistic 3-D, transparency, and soft shadows.

However, some charting features you used in earlier versions of Excel are no longer available or are working differently in Excel 2007...

For example: Dragging data points on a chart.

• In Excel 97-2003: You can drag data points (data points: Individual values plotted in a chart and represented by bars, columns, lines, pie or doughnut slices, dots, and various other shapes called data markers. Data markers of the same color constitute a data series.) on a chart and change their source values on the worksheet.
• In Excel 2007: Dragging data points to change the source values on the worksheet is no longer supported.

That particular feature probably wasn't used much, but (as I found out from an email last week) at least one person used it a lot. And he wasn't too happy to see it taken away.