Evil Excel
Sep 18th 2004Wallabynerd alert
Well, not *evil*, exactly. Just a bit brain-dead. Specifically, the “default” settings for charts, which look absolutely ugly. They don’t look good as slides; they don’t look good printed out; they don’t even look good on the screen. The medium gray background is unpleasant to stare at, and hot pink for the second data series???
Now, none of this is difficult to change. But with all the R&D work that’s gone into Excel over the past 10+ years, you’d really think someone would’ve sat down and realized that hot pink just doesn’t look good on medium gray, and that they could at least choose a lighter gray and red, for instance. I wonder how many thousands of user hours have gone into tweaking things to sensible defaults… or trying to follow ugly/illegible charts in Powerpoint presentations because someone didn’t know how to change the data series options.
On a related note… I have a large amount of data to look at in Excel. It’s a very consistent format (band center of the first fitted peak is always in column E, etc.), but the total number of columns can vary substantially for different data sets. And I don’t necessarily want to always have the same stuff plotted on the charts, either – sometimes I’ll include an otherwise-meaningless peak because it’s a useful feature to normalize the rest of the peaks against, but I don’t want to see the reference peak graphed all over the place.
So, what I’m wondering is… does anyone know of a clever set of macros to create “stock” charts out of certain selectable columns and apply a consistent set of attractive formatting options to each of them? I’m thinking of a dialog that pops up with checkboxes to let me pick which columns to plot (preferably with enough intelligence that I can just pick *peaks* to plot, and it figures out that column E is band center for peak 1, column I is for peak 2, etc.). I could do it myself (well… eventually…) but it’d be kinda great if there’s already something out there. ‘Cause VB for Excel is even uglier than hot pink on medium gray.
