VB6 - Microsoft Chart - Handle With Care

vb123.com Microsoft Chart - A How To Guide For Handling The VB 6 Charting Beast

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Summary Lesson 1.

Smart Access Microsoft Chart is one of the many controls that is bundled in the Professional Edition of
The Magazine that Access Visual Basic and with 190 methods and properties, you would imagine it to be one of the
Developers loved to read best. If you really want the current state of the art in graphs, you had better think twice
and write for is back Read as you may be heading up a dead end. This article explains why it is a tool that can bring
More good results as long as you keep your enthusiasm under control.

RSS & Newsletter Introduction

Join our XML/RSS Newsfeed
or sign up for our
informative newsletter on After spending a number of years manipulating MS Graph in Microsoft Access and Excel, I
Office Automation, Access was called in to make the Microsoft Chart control work for a VB program with over 3000
and VB topics end users. They had converted their product over to VB 5 and had made a decision to
Read More
replace their aging 3rd Party graph control with MS Chart. I came in with little knowledge
of MS Chart and assumed that MS Graph would be similar quality products. Well the only
Get Good Help real similarities are that they are both complicated and they both come with really poor
If you need help with a
database, our Professionals help for programmers. The MS Office Graph Active X object is far more visually appealing
could be the answer and feature rich. See Sidebar.
Read More
My task though was to make MSChart look professional and work with visual basic. This
Is Your Database
article outlines a few changes that make MSChart look a lot better than it is when you
Corrupt ? first add it to your forms.
If you have a corrupt
database, Try our Access
Recovery service

Know MSChart's Limitations

The Workbench Find out
who has your database
open, start the correct Before committing yourself to MS Chart, check that it will provide the graphical look that
version of Access, easy you and your users will find acceptable. If you end up discovering this 3 weeks after you
compacting and backups,
change startup options, mde
start, you will simply have to throw away the code away as it will unlikely be reusable
compile, shutdown database with any other 3rd part graphing tool.
Read and Download
The best way to quickly find out about the appearance of MSChart is to add a new chart
Access >>> SQL
to a form and open up the property pages. Now experiment with the different features in
Upsize to SQL Server 2005
using the Chart Tab.
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VB6 - Microsoft Chart - Handle With Care
or 2008, easily repeated
conversions, highly accurate
SQL query
translation and web form
conversion. You Need Help (and you will be lucky to get it)
Read More

Microsoft Chart comes with volumes of help in MSDN and 95% of it is useless. Here is an
The Toolbox example of the help that you get for the chart legend property
Libraries of software that we
regularly import into our
projects. This is a newer "Returns a reference to a Legend object that contains information about the appearance
version of the Toolshed and behavior of the graphical key and accompanying text that describes the chart series.
More..

Syntax object.Legend

SharePoint The object placeholder represents an object expression that evaluates to an object in the
For our company file sharing
and task management, we Applies To list."
use
SharePointHosting There are no links to any useful examples and very few full examples in the help system.
So the only assistance that you can really get is VB IntelliSense. This gives you all the
Datamining/Graphs
Explore your data with this methods and a lot of constants and it really is a hit and miss exercise. But even
versatile graphing and data IntelliSense comes up with some beautiful long winded statements like that which is
mining shareware tool. required to turn off the grids on the chart.
Read More

Mschart1.Plot.Axis(VtChAxisIdX).AxisGrid.MajorPen.Style = VtPenStyleNull
DryToast
Backup and query your
BaseCamp® projects
Read More
Getting Started
Garry's Blog
Find out a few other things
that Garry has been writing
Click on your components bar and select Microsoft Chart Control (Called mschart.ocx).
about Microsoft Access. Read You will need to have Visual Basic for Professionals as MSChart does not come in the
more Learners Edition. At this stage you might try setting up a demonstration install kit run to
see that the object installs on representative end users systems.
Like FMS Products?
Purchase them from us and Making The Graph Look Better (Manually)
get a free Workbench or
Toolbox More
Before you start programming the charts, you can make the charts look better by
changing the following items. These are my preferences and naturally are open to
Smart Access is Back
opinion. It would be a good idea to write down any changes that you make to your
We have recently purchased
exclusive rights to the Smart graphs manually as you probably should do the same in your startup code.
Access magazine

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VB6 - Microsoft Chart - Handle With Care

Tip 1 : Put a border on the bars. You do this by right clicking on the MSChart object and
About The Editor Garry
Robinson writes for a choosing properties.
number of popular computer
magazines, is now a book Select series color and for C1 change edge color to black. Do this for the first four colors.
author and has worked on
The default setting is the same color as the bar which gives it no definition.
100+ Access databases. He
is based in Sydney, Australia
Contact Us ...

Search ...

or try our new site built with

SharePoint Designer
vb123.com.au

Figure 1 - Use the property pages to change the edge color to black

Tip 2 : Select Axis Grid in the property pages. Set the Style to NULL for the X Axis, Y
axis and Secondary Y Axis.

Tip 3 : Using Excel as a benchmark, select the fonts properties and set the following

Axis Labels - Arial 9 or 10 Regular

Title - Arial 10 or 12 Bold

Tip 4 : At this stage you may want to manually change the chart type using the Chart
Tab.

Tip 5 : Finally change the background color to white by selecting Backdrop and defining
the background Pattern to be full shade rather than null.

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VB6 - Microsoft Chart - Handle With Care

VB 5 & 6 Microsoft Chart - Initializing The Chart (Lesson 2)

The Demonstration Software

The accompanying resource file contains a VB 5 project called GRChart. This project will
show you how to program a number of the key elements that you need to make MS
Chart a smarter object. The code is separated into local form specific code and some
general code that you can use for any MSChart object.

Figure 2 - GRChart Project up and running

Initializing The Settings

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VB6 - Microsoft Chart - Handle With Care

We should establish an initialization subroutine to preset these graph startup sequences

every time we open the chart object. You need to do this to ensure that you have the
same look and feel in your graphs every time. Before calling the startup settings, reset
the chart to avoid any surprises using

MSChart1.ToDefaults

And add the data to the graph so that it has all the series internally stored. This is
important as the settings subroutine (called FX_ResetMSChart) needs to establish the
extent of new data.

Dim numSeries As Integer

With MyChart
.chartType = VtChChartType2dBar

' Establish the number of items in the group

numSeries = .Plot.SeriesCollection.Count

' Add a black line border of each of the shapes

For iCount = 1 To numSeries

.Plot.SeriesCollection(iCount).DataPoints(-1).EdgePen.VtColor.Set 0, 0, 0

Next iCount

' Turn off the background grids

.Plot.Axis(VtChAxisIdX).AxisGrid.MajorPen.Style = VtPenStyleNull

.Plot.Axis(VtChAxisIdY).AxisGrid.MajorPen.Style = VtPenStyleNull

.Plot.Axis(VtChAxisIdY2).AxisGrid.MajorPen.Style = VtPenStyleNull

.Plot.Wall.Pen.Style = VtPenStyleNull

' Define the background color to white

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VB6 - Microsoft Chart - Handle With Care

.Backdrop.Fill.Brush.FillColor.Set 255, 255, 255

.Backdrop.Fill.Style = VtFillStyleBrush

End With

------------

VB 5 & 6 Chart - Getting Data Into The Chart (Lesson 3)

There are a number of ways that you can get data into the Chart control and they
basically involve passing a column of labels and a number of columns of numbers to the
chart control. The chart control then places these in a spreadsheet like container called a
datagrid that you can only access using visual basic. The specific methods that you can
use are

ChartData Transfers an array of suitable data to the control

DataGrid Transfer data and column labels to MSCharts datagrid using methods
similar to those that you would use in arrays.

ADO You can using ADO data binding version 6 of visual basic to add data.
Search for "Data Binding the MSChart Control" in MSDN

For this article, I will illustrate how you can add an array to MSChart. In this example, I
am going to pass 6 different variables to the chart for 8 monthly periods. When testing
your control, use more than the 4 variables to make sure that your initial settings routine
is working well.

imax = 6
Dim X() As Variant
Dim iRow As Integer
ReDim X(1 To 8, 1 To imax + 1)

dataScale = 1
iRow = 1
X(1, iRow) = "Period"
X(2, iRow) = "June 1998"

……
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X(8, iRow) = "June 2004"

For iRow = 2 To imax + 1

X(1, iRow) = "Ann Depr%" & iRow
X(2, iRow) = (12.2 + (iRow * Rnd) * 20) * dataScale
X(3, iRow) = (45 + (iRow * Rnd) * 20) * dataScale

……

X(8, iRow) = (16 + (iRow * Rnd) * 20) * dataScale

Next iRow

addChartData:

' Reset the chart back to default to avoid surprises

MSChart1.ToDefaults

' Pass the chart object reference and array to sub

Call addDataArray(MSChart1, X(), True)

The shared subroutine then adds the data to chart using the following method

MyChart.ChartData = X

-----

VB 5 & 6 Chart - Titles and Legends (Lesson 4)

Most users have had a lot of experience with high quality graphs through spreadsheets
like Excel and Lotus so the pressure is on to add some more information to your graph.
The first thing you might do is add a title. Some of the relevant methods for handling
titles are as follows.

With MSCHART1

.Title.Text = TitleVar
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.Title.VtFont.Name = "Arial"
.Title.VtFont.Size = 12
.Plot.AutoLayout = True
.Title.Location.LocationType = VtChLocationTypeTop

end with

and if you wish to turn the Title off

MSCHART1.Title.Text = ""

For displaying the legend, the following methods will display the legend at the top of the
screen

With MSCHART1.Legend

.Location.Visible = True
.VtFont.Name = "Arial"
.VtFont.Size = 8
.Location.LocationType = VtChLocationTypeTop
.VtFont.Effect = VtFontStyleBold

end with

The simultaneous display of title and legend demonstrates a problem with Chart. The
layout is very difficult to control. In this case the title starts taking up a lot of valuable
acreage on the chart. The other big problem that occurs is where one programmable
event effects an other. This occurs if you want to show the Title and Legend at the one
time in a place of your own choice. The resultant graph positions can at sometimes be
uncontrollable and you will end up chasing methods and events all over the place.

So my recommendation is to avoid the title and show the legend at the top. That way the
legend acts as a definitive title and you do not have to provide additional code to
generate the title. On large charts, it is quite feasible to show both the title and and
legend at the same time.

------

VB Chart - Lines, Bars, 3D, Stacked Bars and Area Graphs (Lesson 5)

Microsoft graph gives you the ability to come up with a number of different graph types
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VB6 - Microsoft Chart - Handle With Care

and I have included an option bar in my demo to demonstrate them. The way that you
change graph types using visual basic is easier than most chart methods and I illustrate
three examples

With MSChart1

chartStr = graphType1(Index).Caption

Select Case chartStr

Case Is = "2D Area"

.chartType = VtChChartType2dArea
.Stacking = True

Case Is = "2D Bar"

.chartType = VtChChartType2dBar
.Stacking = False

Case Is = "3D Bar"

.chartType = VtChSeriesType3dBar
.Plot.Projection = VtProjectionTypeOblique
.Stacking = True

end select

end with

Now I have to stick my neck out here and tell you what I think about the different chart
types that are available in MSCHART. The two dimensional Vertical Bar, Line, Stacked Bar
and Area graphs are all quite acceptable. The other 2D graphs such as Pie, Radar and
Scatter are quite quirky and would only suit a small number of applications.

The 3 Dimensional Graphs are very poor and only work if your chart control is Large and
Square in shape. Figure 3 shows the very best that you can achieve with 3D graphs.
Note the terrible display of the Series Titles at the bottom of the graph. Now if you put
this into a rectangular shape, you still get a Square display which can look really bad. So
my tip if you want perfect 3D graphs, look for a third part control.

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Figure 3 - Illustration Of The 3 Dimensional Features Of MS Chart

VB 5 & 6 Chart - A Summary and An Alternative (Lesson 6)

MSChart is not the best looking graphing product that is available on the market. If you
limit the amount of vb that your write and you do not want 3D graphs, it is probably a
reasonable place to start graphing. Visual basic 6 edition now supports ADO record
sources so that you can get you valuable data into the control and start visualizing your
group by queries quite quickly. The source code that I have provided in the
demonstration database is probably approaching the maximum amount of code that you
should invest in manipulating the control. If you are going to spend a lot of time
programming the control, try MS Graph that comes with Office or have a look at the
alternatives 3rd Party Controls on the market.

About The Author

Garry Robinson runs a software development company called GR-FX based in Sydney,
Australia. Recently he has written a number of articles for Smart Access on topics such
as Consolidating Data Using Queries, Manipulating MS Graph with Access and using
Access to Automated your E-mail. He developed a popular shareware data mining tool
that will allow you to drilldown on data in any linked backend database and then to
visualize that data in 2 or 3D using MS Graph. He also runs a VB resources page at
http://www.gr-fx.com/
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Alternatively add MS Graph That Comes With Office"

Visually the Office Graph object is far more professional looking than Microsoft Chart. To
add MS Graph to your project, you need only have a registered copy of any of the Office

Products. To get started, on the VB components Toolbar, select the OLE

button and draw a square on your form with your mouse where you want to place the
graph object. Release the mouse and choose either the Microsoft Graph 97 Chart, or the
Excel Chart. This will add the OLE/Active X object to your project. If you are developing
for a single organisation that runs Office on all the target users, this is probably the best
visual solution that you can provide your end users. To support this article, I have
written a series of lessons on how to deploy MSGraph with visual basic available from

Read All The Help On-Line About Using MS Office Chart From Visual Basic

or Try Our Microsoft Access Graph Loop

That the end of the VB Chart Lessons !!!

Click Here for the download file Click here to find out how to donate to get the
download file or to purchase The Toolshed.

Next Article

Published 1999-09: A lot of the information in these Visual Basic graph lessons first
appeared as the lead article in the July edition of Visual Basic Developer by Pinnacle
Publishing. www.pinpub.com

Links >>> Home | Search | Workbench | Orders | Newsletter | Access Security | Access professionals

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