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In the previous two charting posts, I wrote about how you can make a professional chart with four simple choices – chart type, chart layout, chart style, and document theme. As useful as we hope that is, we know that some users will want to tweak and control every aspect of their charts. Today I want to walk through the tabs that are available when you are working with a chart and provide an overview of all the capabilities that are exposed in the ribbon. I am also going to briefly cover templates.
Design Tab
When you are working with a chart, three additional contextual tabs will be available – Design, Layout, and Format. Here is a shot if the Design Tab.
(Click to enlarge)
The Design tab allows users to set the style and layout of a chart. In addition, this is where you change the chart type, change the data source, move the chart, and a few other things. The bulk of this was covered in previous posts.
Layout Tab
The chart layout tab contains easy access to the various elements of a chart – title, legend, axes, series, data labels, etc. Each element has its own gallery of simple choices to construct charts. Most of these choices were available in previous versions of Excel, but you had to find the correct dialog to use them. With the ribbon, these choices are much more accessible and results-oriented.
Here are examples – one for legends, and the one for an axis. The legend gallery gives you a choice of places to put the legend. The axis gallery gives you a choice of how you would like to see the axis. Other galleries give choices for data label position, category axis direction, and gridline patterns.
Note that the galleries have a “More Options …” choice at the bottom. The goal of the galleries is to make it easy to apply common settings with one click. Since not every capability would fit in these galleries, so there is still a format dialog for each chart element, much like in previous versions of Excel, which is launched when the user selects “More Options …” This gives the user the finest level of control over the features. (The format dialog is now modeless, so you can click to other elements and change their formatting. Also, the choices have also been rearranged somewhat, trying to make them fit better together.)
By now, you are probably getting a sense as to the “three level” approach that the ribbon affords us. At the top level, users can select from galleries on the Design tab (chart layout, chart style) that to create a wide variety of charts very simply. If users then want to do more detailed tweaking, they can move to the Layout tab, where they can manipulate the objects on the chart, again using very visual, results-oriented galleries. And, for those folks that want even more fine-grained control, there are modal dialogs with every available setting.
Format Tab
The Format tab is based on the Format tab used for shapes (which I haven’t yet covered in a post, but I will at some point). You can choose any chart element, and format it just as though it is an OfficeArt shape.
This includes control over the fill: 16 million colours, transparency, gradient fills, and texture and picture fills. It also includes control over the lines: 16 million colours, transparency, dashing, compound lines, arrows, and even cap and join settings. Effects, such as shadow, glow, soft edges, and bevel, can also be accessed from the Format tab. All of these are drawn using OfficeArt, so they are high quality and look consistent. OfficeArt draws smooth antialiased lies, which makes line charts look so much better. 3-D charts are drawn with OfficeArt 3-D, including antialiasing, lighting, shadows, and materials. In a post from a few months back, you can see many of these effects on charts.
The Format tab also includes WordArt effects for text. If you want your chart title to glow or look chiselled, the WordArt effects enable it. The text is drawn with ClearType, making it much more readable than text on charts in previous versions, especially at smaller sizes.
Templates
Finally, a quick word about templates. Once you have a finished designing a custom chart to look just like you want it, you can save it as a template. This is similar to the custom chart types of previous versions, but we have exposed the feature a bit more carefully (both on the ribbon and in the Create Chart dialog). Also, the templates are stored as separate files in a directory, making it much easier to share them from user to user or machine to machine. Finally, for those interested in the new file formats, templates use the same schema as charts.
Comments: (15) Collapse
The pictures that appear when you click the screenshot for legend and axis are identical. Can you please fix this?
Thanks,
Patrick Schmid
I don't like the round corners on the UI. I think it's the wrong scheme for mature business applications like Excel. Please tell your people to get rid of them. If they're left in that's a shame. As a long time user I will not encourage people to upgrade.
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I would love to hear Otman's arguments against Excel 2007: "Yeah, it has a 1000x bigger grid, and multithreaded calculations, and professional styles, charting and pivot tables, and full-featured open XML-based file format, and, well, whatnot. But look at those round corners!!! That is totally unacceptable in business world!!!"
Could you clarify a bit on which chart option have a Live Preview enabled? Judging on beta 1 bits, only the last context tab (Format tab) has Live Preview enabled on the options.
I have to admit this is the first time I've paid attention to the upper-right corners in the full screen pictures of the XL UI. I noticed there's no X in for the document window. Presumably it'll still be possible to close workbooks by pressing the [Ctrl]+[F4] key combination, but will it be necessary to wade into the menus/ribbon to do this with a mouse?
As for the topic at hand, the graphic for turning the legend off is poorly conceived. Why not show just the plot area with no orange legend and no stupid red X? Or put the stupid red X on top of a washed out legend box? And why not dabble in some consistency and use an explanatory phrase like the one for no axis, e.g., 'Do not display legend'? The current interface with it's checkbox for 'Show legend' makes more sense, but who am I to stand in the way of change for change's sake.
Above you said "OfficeArt draws smooth antialiased lies,". Was this a Fredian slip about "lies, damned lies and statistics"?
But seriously, I think it looks great.
Patrick - done.
Mike - I believe the plan is that no chart galleries will have Live Preview enabled.
Harlan - Ctrl+F4 works. To close the active worksheet, you press the big red document-level "X". This change was made for consistency with Word and PPT which have behaved this way for some time. Thus, if you have two books open (A and B), and you are looking at A, and you press the "X", A closes and you are looking at B. I will pass along your feedback on the graphic.
Where is the big red document-level "X"? Do you mean the "X" at the extreme right in the top-most row of the application window? I don't see any other "X" on your screen images. Is there no such "X" when only one work_book_ is open?
Maybe Office 2003 works this way, but Office XP works the old-fashioned way. If by 'for some time' you mean the almost 3+ year period from the Office 2003 release to the current estimate of the Office 2007 release, OK, but I'm one of the majority of Excel/Office users who didn't bother with the Excel/Office 2003 upgrade.
Actually, to get the document window X, you have to not show windows in taskbar. To me, not showing each individual document window in the taskbar makes much more sense, as does having the big red X for the application, and a smaller X for the document. For me, Excel 2003 works just fine in this regard, as did 2002, 2000, and 97. It was Word in about 2000 which made the ridiculous switch to showing windows in the taskbar.
Why when Excel works fine, are things always changed to make them consistent with Word and PowerPoint?
How come so many tech people responding to tech blogs propose suggestions with "Why not ?" and "Why didn't you ?". It's such an accusatory and arrogant "I'm smarter than you" tone and is presented as a *demand* for an answer, particularly when repeated over and over ala Harlan Grove.
"How about " or "I suggest " are much more pleasant and more likely to get a response. Of course, if one's goal is to troll like Harlan, then one would want to be as obnoxious as possible.
"Why when Excel works fine, are things always changed to make them consistent with Word and PowerPoint?"
Maybe because the average Excel user knows more about what they're doing in Excel than the average Word or PP user knows about what they're doing in those programs, so Excel users can more easily form rational opinions about how programs should work. Microsoft seems to prefer less sophisticated users who'll just use the software as they're told and be happy to do so. Microsoft may be dumbing down Excel in hopes of dumbing down Excel users.
If Excel users are forced to adapt to Word/PP interfaces, why can't the Excel development team also provide some of Word's functionality that Excel currently lacks, e.g., the current Word menu's Format > Change Case... ? [And if anyone can point to anything in PP that could be classed as 'functionality' in some sense other than that of animated screen savers...]
Molly C,
When Microsoft *REMOVES* functionality from Excel in the guise of improving it, shouldn't rational people complain?
Also, isn't consistency good?
If you believe I write in a way that requires response, I must be doing something right.
HAND
Hi folks - update. The document-level "X" is going to make a reappearance due to beta feedback. Thanks to the beta testers out there that that voiced their opinion.
Harlan, consistency is good, which is where the change to the big red X came from - we had plenty of complaints about the apps not being consistent, hence the change (Word made the change in Word 2000). I can see the point that you are making, and all I can say is that there is an option to revert the behaviour to current behaviour.
nice collection
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