Charts in ExcelApplication

If you open an existing Excel file with ExcelApplication.Open, you can use ExcelWriter's charting objects to modify charts in the spreadsheet.

To create a simple column chart:

1. Get a Charts collection:

   The Charts collection contains all charts in a specified worksheet.

2. Create an anchor in the worksheet:

   An anchor represents the position of a floating object (e.g., a chart) within a worksheet. The chart's top left corner will be placed at the anchor.

3. Create a blank chart of a specified type, at the anchor you created:

   The ChartType class contains all available chart types (e.g., Column) and sub-types (e.g., Clustered).

4. Return a SeriesCollection object representing the set of data series in the chart:

5. Set the range of category (x) axis values:

6. Add a data series to the chart:

   The formula passed to CreateSeries represents cells that contain the source values for the new data series.

Example: Creating a Chart

Modifying an Existing Chart

Code sample: Modifying an Existing Chart

When you use ExcelApplication to open a spreadsheet, you can access charts through their names or titles. Chart.getTitle returns a ChartText object representing the title region. ChartText.getText returns the title text. The following function takes a chart's title and returns a Chart object representing the chart. This code can be useful if you want to locate a specific chart in a worksheet but only know its title text:

The following example uses the FindChart code to locate a specific chart in a worksheet. The chart series collection is then cleared and re-set to the data imported from a database: