About making changes to a chart in a form or report

Microsoft Office Access 2003

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About making changes to a chart in a form or report

When you edit a chart, you can either make changes to the look of the chart or the data used to create it.

To change the look of the chart, you can change the size of the chart on the form or report or you can change the appearance of the chart with Microsoft Graph. For example, with Graph, you can change the location of the parts of the chart (such as the legend), the text format, the colors and patterns, and the axis scaling.

To change the data used to create the chart, you can modify the underlying table or other record source, or the query in the RowSource property.

When you use the Chart Wizard to create a chart that displays data from Microsoft Access, you choose the table or other record source that includes the fields that are displayed in the chart. This underlying table or other record source contains the data, such as sales figures or customer lists. After you have finished making selections in the Chart Wizard, Access creates a query in the RowSource property, which is based on the underlying table or other record source. The query in the RowSource property reflects the choices you made in the Chart Wizard to restrict the data, such as a range of dates or orders from a specific region.

For example, if you notice that the sales figures in your chart are wrong, the problem may be in the data stored in the underlying table, or in the design of the underlying record source. In this case, correct the underlying table or other record source. However, if you left out a field that you want to appear in your chart, either you can use the Chart Wizard to create the chart again or you can edit the query in the RowSource property.

Note  In a Microsoft Access project, you can't use the Chart Wizard, but you can add a chart by inserting the Microsoft Graph Chart object (Insert menu, Object command).