edit chart legend spacing

[phocused]

Hi, I am creating an office 2007 pie chart. I have the legend on the right
with a list of entries relating to the data in the pie chart. However the
legend doesnt show all the entries unless I make the chart a really big size.
The Legend looks like this
Daily

Weekly

Monthly

So On

I have noticed that there is what looks to be double line spacing between
each entry in the legend and I want to make the entries closer together so it
looks more like this
Daily
Weely
Monthly
So On

but I can find anywhere that allows you to edit this. i can edit fill, font,
shadow, everything except this one simple thing.

Any ideas?

[Jon Peltier]

Select the legend, then drag the handles to stretch it laterally. This will
prevent the line wrapping which produces double-height legend entries.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services, Inc.
http://PeltierTech.com/WordPress/
_______

"phocused" <phoc...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:35EA3B19-DDFA-446D...@microsoft.com...

[Dan]

Jon...

I often wonder if you MVP's even read what the original post says. His
legend entries are single words such as "Daily" and "Weekly." I'm not a
"Microsoft MVP" but I can bet that line wrapping isn't the issue here. The
problem is how excel 2007 automatically formats the legend to have
ridiculously large spacing in between each legend entry. This wouldn't be
such a big problem except for the fact that it appears to be impossible to
change that line spacing. Really now... this is sad.

[Jon Peltier]

I read what the post said. The OP made a pie chart and the legend entry
height was too large, double height. He was unable to change the legend
entry height no matter what he tried.

A double height legend entry is generally caused by wrapping in the legend
entries. I can reproduce this in Classic Excel and Excel 2007 with a simple
list of labels like this:

Daily
Weekly
Saturday, March 19 1959, 3:45 am

For all we know, "so on" means something like "Saturday, March 19 1959,
3:45 am".

I also made a bunch of pie charts in 2007 with a reasonable number of points
with uniformly sized labels. I noticed that the spacing between legend
entries is about a line and a half (not nearly double height, but more than
in 2003), but I can readily adjust the size of the legend to change this
spacing.

I did not see a problem like the OP described until I made a pie chart with
a lot of wedges (16), but even then, if I stretched the legend widthwise and
shrunk it back, the legend entry height shrunk from line and a half to a
reasonable size, and they all fit. So while there is no option anywhere that
lets you explicitly set legend entry height, like there is for paragraph
spacing in Word, you can resize the legend and make things fit.

Since we haven't heard back from the OP, we don't know what he tried in the
meantime, including my suggestion to resize the legend, which helps with the
wrapping problem and with the too-many-data-points problem.

Now, if people did listen to MVPs, they would not use such ineffective chart
types as pie charts, especially not pie charts that contain more than about
four segments. Nor would they have "up"graded Excel 2007 if they were at all
serious about charting their data, since 2007 is loaded with glitches like
this, many much worse than this.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services, Inc.
http://PeltierTech.com/WordPress/
_______

"Dan" <D...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:99D29F1B-B523-44B3...@microsoft.com...

[jasperdog]

This is yet another Excel weakness that they refuse to fix. I've read online about how there's a paragraph format section on the HOME tab (there isn't), and about how large line spacing ONLY happens when you have wrapped legend text (it doesn't) and about how you can grab the top or bottom edge to shrink the box and it will magically reduce line spacing (it doesn't). Microsoft employees just refuse to admit error, that's what I think!

[in...@c-hbooks.com]

You're correct! They cannot admit it. I'm in MS 2010 and it's still a problem.

[lcio...@gmail.com]

Yes this is a problem. I found that I can get the spacing to reduce, but you have to make sure none of the labels wrap. Even then the legend text box has to be huge compared to the actual legend and text. If one label wraps, all the labels will be double spaced, which make no since. The wrapped line should just effect the next label spacing.

[zisl...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, January 29, 2009 7:09:00 AM UTC-5, phocused wrote:

Select Chart toolbar to become visible. When you click on the legend in the graph, the legend icon on the toolbar will become available. Click on the legend icon twice and the legend entries will resize to normal spacing. The font size can then be adjusted.

[elizabet...@gmail.com]

In addition to the fact that this answer does not deal with the problem that the user is having (there is no line wrapping), it is not even true! I have a legend which has one entry which is longer than the others, so when it wraps, the other entries are too spaced out. When I pull it lengthwise, however, ALL the entries are triple-spaced.

After much frustrating I have just put it into Numbers on the iPad. That program, by the way, cost me just over $10.

Elizabeth

[whal...@gmail.com]

Excel 2010, checking in to say that this is still a problem. The solution should be to allow manual resizing of specific entries, but as far as I can see, one wrapped entry buggers the whole thing, meaning I need to either make it so wide or so tall that it's ugly.

[rincew...@googlemail.com]

2015 Excel 2013. Still the same problem
One legend wraps to take up two or more lines. All other legend entries take up that number of lines. I cold live with this as a default (even thought it is pretty stupid) but why cant I chance the size and position of the box for individual legend entries