HOWTO: Set the FillColor in the MS Chart Control at Run-time

• Microsoft Visual Basic Learning, Professional, and Enterprise Editions for Windows, version 5.0

SUMMARY

With the Microsoft Chart control, the FillColor property allows you to change the color of different objects in the chart such as data points, shadows, walls, and markers. The FillColor property has a Red, Blue, and Green property that you set to an integer value to control the value of that color component.

This article illustrates how you can set the FillColor property at run-time by showing you how to create a project that will change the bar colors of chart. This information can be applied to other chart objects that support the FillColor property.

MORE INFORMATION

1. Start a new Standard EXE project in Visual Basic. Form1 is created by default.

2. Click Components on the Project menu and check "Microsoft Chart Control."

3. Add one chart control, three label controls, three text boxes, and one command button to Form1.

4. Copy the following code to the Code window of Form1:

         Option Explicit
   

         Private Sub Form_Load()
            MSChart1.ColumnCount = 1
   
            Label1.Caption = "Red Value:"
            Label2.Caption = "Green Value:"
            Label3.Caption = "Blue Value:"
   
            Text1.Text = "0"
            Text2.Text = "0"
            Text3.Text = "0"
   
            Command1.Caption = "Change Bar Color"
   
            Command1_Click
         End Sub
   
         Private Sub Command1_Click()
         'This event changes the bar colors of the graph.
   
            With MSChart1.Plot.SeriesCollection(1).DataPoints(-1)
               .Brush.Style = VtBrushStyleSolid
               .Brush.FillColor.Red = CInt(Text1.Text)
               .Brush.FillColor.Green = CInt(Text2.Text)
               .Brush.FillColor.Blue = CInt(Text3.Text)
            End With
         End Sub
   
   

5. Press the F5 key to run the program. Enter a value from 0 to 255 in any of the text boxes and click Change Bar Color. The color of the bars in the chart changes to the values entered in the text boxes.

REFERENCES

For additional information on the MS Chart control, you can download a sample file from the Visual Basic Owner's site. Please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base for download instructions:

   ARTICLE-ID: Q175212
   TITLE     : FILE: Visual Basic MSChart Sample

• http://premium.microsoft.com/download/vbasic/ChrtSamp.exe (181Kb)