Chart Pattern Fills

re: Chart Pattern Fills

debbibj — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:22:36 GMT

Bonnie - You have to hit return after the line that you pasted in (at least that's what worked for me).

But to the developers: I make a lot of documents for general audiences using graphs with color fills. Unpatterned colors don't show up well in photocopied versions, but black/white is boring in the original document. I tried diligently to follow your instructions for the add-in but got lost shortly after the downloads. Has anything been done since the original 2007 conversation?

re: Chart Pattern Fills

Bonnie — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 13:48:07 GMT

I followed your first instructions but the pattern did not fill in the chosen chart element - see next paragraph for exactly what I did.

I created a bar chart, then chose one of the bars in the chart, then pressed Alt F11 (Visual Basic did open), then Cntl G (the Immediate Window did open), and I cut and pasted selection.fill.patterned (4) into the Immediate Window but my chosen chart element did not change in appearance as promised. I closed all the windows, started from scratch again, and this time I typed in selection.fill.patterned (4), but as expected, this did not change anything either.

Please advise what I could be doing incorrectly.

Also, if I go through the hassle of adding the pattern dropdown on the Chart Format tab, will this dropdown be available in all future excel files I create, or do I need to do this process for every single file in which I need patterns in my chart elements?

Suggestion: Create a program that adds the pattern drop-down option so that those of us who need it can simply click on a link that updates our current version of excel to include the pattern dropdown that you show in this blog so that users do not have to mess around with the underbelly programming of excel that we have no interest/time/propensity to do.

http://www.middle-empire.com

Middle Empire — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 04:59:09 GMT

Very good tips!

Middle-Empire

http://www.middle-empire.com

re: Chart Pattern Fills

Mbajiuka Uchechukwu — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:46:27 GMT

I am school lecturer needs to know all about the tutorial on microsoft excel chart.

re: Chart Pattern Fills

Stephane Rodriguez — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:20:04 GMT

"I was wondering if anybody realize, in Excel 2007, theme colors 0 to 3 do not match. Theme index of 0 in styles.xml is mapped to color 1 and theme index of 1 is mapped to color 0 in theme1.xml. Same thing happens to color 2 and 3."

The first two colors are indeed swapped. It's a bug in Excel 2007. To fix this without killing existing Excel 2007 files, they will have to introduce a new disambiguation attribute, which in turn will make developers' lives harder (since they will have to implement both cases instead of just grabbing the color by index).

re: Chart Pattern Fills

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 15:55:11 GMT

Kokkit:

Yes! I noticed that too. I had to stick in a little swap just for those four colours and only for Excel. I'm thinking there is a map, like the explicit one in PowerPoint, but instead of being stored in the file it is internal to Excel since it is constant (or maybe they just wanted to keep us on our toes?). Talking about constant things, try modifying fill style 0 in styles.xml by hand...

Talking about themes and colours, can anyone figure out how to apply tint in charts properly? The ECMA documentation indicates some sort of linear formula but that's not what I'm seeing. I've tried asking the OfficeArt guys but their blog is dead. I've also asked this at the developper Forum but no one's replied there either.

openxmldeveloper.org/.../1627.aspx

Any hints would be greatly appreciated. The magic formula itself would earn my eternal gratitude.

re: Chart Pattern Fills

kokkit — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:57:04 GMT

Posting in this blog is rather inconvenient. I apologize for spaming chart pattern fills with a theme color issue.

I was wondering if anybody realize, in Excel 2007, theme colors 0 to 3 do not match. Theme index of 0 in styles.xml is mapped to color 1 and theme index of 1 is mapped to color 0 in theme1.xml. Same thing happens to color 2 and 3.

This is contradicting to the spec (OOXML part 3, page 147). Perhaps, the engineer misused this erratic mapping that could be resulted from the clrSchemeMapping order in Word?

Thanks

re: Chart Pattern Fills

gkoehler — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:32:19 GMT

I hope patterns are restored as a built-in option from Ribbon with Office SP1. Should not have to spend time creating custom solution to get something I already had in previous version.

re: Chart Pattern Fills

Yuvraj — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:56:37 GMT

After saving the file as an add-in, can i apply rights to it? when i open the xla file the permission icon for assigning rights is grayed out.

Is password protection the only way to protect an add-in file?

re: Chart Pattern Fills

Ute Simon — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 11:38:45 GMT

I wish this option were available for PowerPoint 2007, too. Though PPT-charts are now based on Excel, there seems to be no way to apply pattern fills to them. :-(

Aside from printing in b&w, patterns are a great help for colorblind people to help them distinguish the items.