Microsoft Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer's Guide

Understanding the Chart Control

The Chart control is an ActiveX control that lets you create a two-dimensional graphical representation of data displayed in a Web page in Internet Explorer 4.01 or later. You get the most complete functionality with this control, and all of the Office Web Component controls, by using Internet Explorer 5 or later.

The Chart control can be bound to a Spreadsheet control, a Data Source control, a PivotTable List control, an ADO recordset, or any ActiveX control that supports data binding. You can bind the chart to a local data source (data stored in the HTML code in the page itself) or to a remote data source (data stored in a Microsoft Access or SQL Server database, for example). As data changes in the data source, the Chart control automatically updates, scales, and sizes itself appropriately.

You can insert a Chart control in a Web page in several ways:

• In Excel, you can add a Chart control to a Web page by using the Chart Wizard to create a chart and then using the Publish as Web Page dialog box to create a Web page that contains the chart.
  
  
• In Access, you can add a chart to a data access page by clicking the Office Chart tool in the toolbox and then clicking the place on the page where you want the chart to appear. This launches the Microsoft Office Chart Wizard, which steps you through the process of connecting the chart to a data source.
  
  
• In FrontPage, you can add a Chart control to a page by pointing to Component on the Insert menu, and then clicking Office Chart. This inserts an empty Chart control on the page, but unlike in Access, the Microsoft Office Chart Wizard is not launched. To bind the control to data, you use VBScript code in the Web page. For an example, see DataSourceControl.htm in the ODETools\V9\Samples\OPG\Samples\CH12 subfolder on the Office 2000 Developer CD-ROM.
  
  
• You can also insert a Chart control directly in a web page by adding an <OBJECT> tag for the control to the page and specifying the control's CLSID as the setting for the CLASSID attribute. You can then use VBA or VBScript code to work with the chart programmatically.

The CLSID for the Chart control and all the objects and related methods and properties for the control are documented in the Msowcvba.chm Help file, which is located in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\1033 subfolder.

Note The path to the Msowcvba.chm Help file reflects the language ID folder (1033) for U.S. English language support in Office. The language ID folder below C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office differs for each language.