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This was taken from "The Underground Guide to Office, OLE 2, and VBA", Chapter 3, and can be found under the heading Scaling Issues—Excel Charts. This material has been updated for Office 95.
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This is probably the most common scaling problem we encounter. Say you have a chart in Excel. Embed said chart in a Word document. Try and tweak the size of the chart and the chart is fubar. Happens all the time.
There are two types of charts generated in Excel. Charts are either located in a chart sheet or they are (just to really confuse everyone) embedded on a worksheet. In keeping with Microsoft’s shaky terminology we’ll call them "chart sheet chart" and "worksheet chart." Either type can be embedded in a Word document.
Here is an example of a worksheet chart embedded in a Word container document. See Figure 3.28.
Figure 3.28 An Excel Worksheet Chart Embedded in Word
Select the chart and you can resize it via the sizing handles discussed earlier. But resize a chart like this at your peril. Here’s what you get if you try to make it smaller. See Figure 3.29. Then again, given all the wacko problems caused by different video drivers, you might get this result or as Monty Python was fond of saying, "something completely different."
Figure 3.29 Same Chart Scaled Smaller
Not so good, is it? What’s that in the background? It’s the worksheet that this chart is embedded in, in Excel, which is now embedded in Word along with everything else in the Excel workbook. The presentation has gone gonzo but is easily fixed in Word. When you embed a data object in Word, the Word program uses what is called an embed field to control the encapsulated data. If you turn on field codes (Tools / Options / View filecard / check the Field Codes check box), you’ll see this field code in place of the displayed object.
{EMBED Excel.Chart.5 \s}
The trouble is that trailing backslash ess, "\s". Just delete it. Make it look like this:
{EMBED Excel.Chart.5}
Oh, and you have to remove it before it gets trashed or removing it won’t help. An embedded chart sheet chart or an embedded worksheet chart with the offending \s removed can be resized by just selecting the object and dragging the sizing handles. Like so. See Figure 3.30.
Figure 3.30 Rescaled Without Display Disaster
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