Making neat Excel charts (quickly)

If, like me, you spend a lot of time building spreadsheets with charts, you will want to make sure they are all lined up and neat.

This is how I do it. You can get this whole process done in seconds with a bit of practice :-).

1. Select the range of cells that  you want your chart to cover.
2. Name it “foo”. You can do that quickly with the keyboard shortcut Alt+i n d (so Alt+i, then ‘n’ and then ‘d’) which brings up the Name Range box.
3. Use Alt+F11 to bring up your VBA window and select View->Immediate (or use Ctrl+G).
4. Select the chart.
5. Paste the following code into the immediate window:

   ActiveChart.Parent.Left = Range("foo").Left
   ActiveChart.Parent.Top = Range("foo").Top
   ActiveChart.Parent.Height = Range("foo").Height
   ActiveChart.Parent.Width = Range("foo").Width

6. Run each line: put your cursor at the end of the first line and hit Enter to run each line by line.