Problem sizing charts and graphs

[J Newell]

I have several client generated presentations that include many pie
charts and bar graphs. I assume they were orginally generated in Excel.

I'm hired by clients to go in and pretty up their presentations and I
have a pretty good grasp of PowerPoint and have been using it for about
six years on a regular basis. I know how to go into a chart and change
fonts, sizes, colors, and data information but the following has me
stumped.

My problem:
When I want to work on a bar chart or pie graph (or any other chart
type) I'm limited by a bounding box within the chart program. This is
the frame that comes up when you double click on any chart in PPT. More
times than not, the chart itself is only taking up about 1/3 or 1/2 of
the frame area. I can't seem to ever resize so that the chart fills the
area...hence, the bounding box (frame) is considerably larger than the
actual chart. So much so, that resizing my charts sometimes requires me
to use a 25% slide view just so I can see the chart handles way out in
the slide margins. I believe this has been the case in every version of
PPT I've used. It's a confusing mess of overlapping charts when more
than one is used on a slide.

Also, even though I have Auto Scale selected in the font format window,
they don't seem to resize with the chart... (i.e., if I make the chart
smaller, the text stays the same size.)

One last thing, is it possible to adjust line space within a chart so
that a multi-line label looks asthetically pleasing?

Thank you.
Jodi- WinXP - PPT 2002

 

[J Newell]

Steve,

Thank you for the great tip! I have been trying to resize the "chart area" and the
outside bounding box but never even knew about the Plot Area.

I think this will solve a lot of problems hopefully including some font issues
I've been dealing with. I can have two pie charts side by side that look like they
are physically the same size but when I go to match up the font sizes to look the
same, one will end up using 12pt Arial and the other 20pt Arial! I find that a bit
odd. Maybe that too has something to do with the Plot Area size. I've played with
Auto Scale thinking that is the culprit but doesn't seem to make a difference.

Now if I could only figure out how to reduce the spacing between text lines...

Jodi-