Text boxes move on their own

[John Michl]

Help! I have a frustrating situation. What causes text boxes to move
around on charts on their own? For instance, I have a group of shapes
including some text boxes that reference information on sheet such as
messages or summary numbers. Sometimes when the data change for a chart,
the boxes move. I've turned off Resize with chart and I've "moved to front"
but I can't seem to figure out what causes these changes. Another example
is a dynamic subtitle placed directly under the title in the chart. When
inserting it the first time, I center justify the text in the box, however,
it seems to float to the left and right when new data refreshes the chart.

This is critical to me since I have VBA programming that changes the data
and prints hundreds of charts to PDF files. It is disappointing to pull up
the PDFs to find that things have moved.

Thanks.

- John Michl

 

[John Michl]

Thanks Tushar. I took a look at the articles and unfortunately didn't find
much that could help since my chart is not of the embedded type. Any other
ideas?

 

[Jon Peltier]

Hi John -

Text boxes are notorious for not staying where you put them. Instead,
you can make a dummy XY Scatter series, with a point where you want a
label to be. Format the point to have no marker and no line, and choose
any old option for the data labels (show label or show value). Single
click on the data label twice, then you can select the text, and
overtype with whatever you want. Or when the label is highlighted by a
gray border, type = in the formula bar, and click on a cell to put the
contents of that cell into the label. The point can be outside of the
normal plotting rectangle, where a point wouldn't normally appear; the
data label is still where the point's X and Y would be.

- Jon

 

[Jon Peltier]

Hi John -

I just made myself a chart with Y axis scale from 0 to 6. I added a
series with a point at y=-2, and I added a data label to the point using
Rob Bovey (http://appspro.com)'s Chart Labeler, which doesn't require
you to select the point; John Walkenbach (http://j-walk.com)'s Chart
Tools addin is also good for this. Although the point is outside the
plotted range, and isn't itself visible, the label was right where I
intended it to be. As long as the axis scales are fixed, the label will
not move.

- Jon