32. Using Excel Charts

The charting engine in legacy versions of Excel was antique. Nothing had changed in the past 15 years. Microsoft attempted a giant step forward with the charting engine for Office 2007. However, in practice, the Office 2007 charting engine was slower and included several bugs. The charting engine in Excel 2010 includes fixes for bugs, is nearly as fast as Excel 2003, and restores some favorite features that were removed in Excel 2007. In addition, Excel 2010 adds a new type of word-sized chart called Sparklines. To read about these charts, see Chapter 33, “Using Sparklines.”

Although Sparkline charts offer a lot of eye-candy appeal, there are still no new chart types in Excel 2010. You are limited to the same basic 73 ...

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