With the release of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Microsoft Office 2007, you can now programmatically access and manipulate charts using the VBA object model in Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2. Prior to Service Pack 2, you could only access charts using the VBA object model in Excel 2007.
The chart object in Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 is drawn by the same shared Office drawing layer implementation used by Excel 2007, so if you’re familiar with the charting object model in Excel 2007, you can easily migrate Excel VBA code that manipulates charts into Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 VBA code.
In Excel 2007, a chart is represented by the ChartObject object. In Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2, a chart is represented by a Chart object. The Chart object is contained by an InlineShape or Shape (in Word 2007 SP2) and a Shape (in PowerPoint 2007 SP2). In Word 2007 SP2, you can use the InlineShapes collection of the Document object to add new or access existing charts. In PowerPoint 2007 SP2, you can use the Shapes collection of the Slide object to add new or access existing charts. You can use the AddChart method for both collections, specifying the chart type and location within the document or slide, to add a new chart.
You can use the HasChart property to determine if an InlineShape object (InlineShape.HasChart in Word 2007 SP2) or Shape object (Shape.HasChart in PowerPoint 2007 SP2) contains a chart. If HasChart returns True, you can then use the Chart property to get a reference to a Chart object that represents the chart. At this point, the implementation is virtually identical in Excel 2007 SP2, Word 2007 SP2, and PowerPoint 2007 SP2, and VBA code can be transferred across all three programs in most cases.
For example, the following VBA code adds a new 2-D stacked column chart to the active worksheet in Excel and sets the chart’s source data to the range A1:C3 from the Sheet1 worksheet.
1: Sub AddChart_Excel()
2: Dim objShape As Shape
3:
4: ' Create a chart and return a Shape object reference.
5: ' The Shape object reference contains the chart.
6: Set objShape = ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddChart(XlChartType.xlColumnStacked100)
7:
8: ' Ensure the Shape object contains a chart. If so,
9: ' set the source data for the chart to the range A1:C3.
10: If objShape.HasChart Then
11: objShape.Chart.SetSourceData Source:=Range("'Sheet1'!$A$1:$C$3")
12: End If
13: End Sub
By comparison, the following VBA code adds a new 2-D stacked column chart to the active document in Word 2007 and sets the chart’s source data to the range A1:C3 from the chart data associated with the chart.
1: Sub AddChart_Word()
2: Dim objShape As InlineShape
6: Set objShape = ActiveDocument.InlineShapes.AddChart(XlChartType.xlColumnStacked100)
11: objShape.Chart.SetSourceData Source:="'Sheet1'!$A$1:$C$3"
The Chart object in Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 does have a few differences from the Excel 2007 SP2 implementation.
1: Sub ShowWorkbook_Word()
4: ' Iterates each inline shape in the active document.
5: ' If the inline shape contains a chart, then display the
6: ' data associated with that chart and minimize the application
7: ' used to display the data.
8: For Each objShape In ActiveDocument.InlineShapes
9: If objShape.HasChart Then
10:
11: ' Activate the topmost window of the application used to
12: ' display the data for the chart.
13: objShape.Chart.ChartData.Activate
14:
15: ' Minimize the application used to display the data for
16: ' the chart.
17: objShape.Chart.ChartData.Workbook.Application.WindowState = -4140
18: End If
19: Next
20: End Sub
The Open XML SDK 2.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP) is here!
You can find the documentation for it here and the SDK download here.
Zeyad Rajabi, a Program Manager for the Open XML SDK, has begun a series of posts covering the Open XML SDK design goals and architecture, sprinkling in some sample code as he goes along.
Also, Eric White, a Microsoft Technical Evangelist, has a great write up on the new version of the SDK.
This new version of the SDK is an amazing leap forward.The Open XML SDK version 1 greatly simplified working with packages. Developers could manipulate Open XML file format compliant documents at the package and part levels using strongly typed .NET classes. To access the file formats at the element level, you still had to work directly with the underlying XML.
In the Open XML SDK version 2, the development team has taken most of the elements in the various schemas for the Open XML file formats (WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML, PresentationML, etc., etc.) and made first-class managed objects out of them. Not to mention the fact that they've "linq-ified" the entire API so you have the power of Linq, as well.
This makes things much easier if, like me, working with XML directly isn’t your strong suit. With the Open XML SDK v2, I can work with objects that represent the XML elements instead of having to work in the underlying XML itself (although the SDK also supports LINQ to XML, as well). For instance, suppose I needed to locate the first table in a Word document. I could easily locate the first table present in the document with code like this:
1: using (WordprocessingDocument theDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(location, true))
2: {
3: MainDocumentPart mainPart = theDoc.MainDocumentPart;
4:
5: Table theTable = mainPart.Document.Descendants<Table>().First();
You can see the advantage of using this new version of the SDK in line 5 of the code snippet where, by specifying that I want to filter for descendants of the Document object (which represents the <w:document> element in the Microsoft implementation of the Open XML WordprocessingML) where the descendant is of type Table (that is, I want all <w:tbl> elements), I can immediately get to the tables in my Word document. Then, by using the First() extension method, I can select the first table element in the returned list of descendant table elements. All without having to do the detailed work of traversing the underlying XML directly; the API handles the XML work for me.
Or how about trying to get to the text in a specific cell in the Word 2007 table? I’m simplifying things a great deal, but let's assume I know which cell has the data I want (the cell in the 2nd row and 1st column):
1: TableRow theRow = theTable.Elements<TableRow>().ElementAt(1);
2:
3: TableCell theCell = theRow.Elements<TableCell>().ElementAt(0);
5: string cellText = theCell.InnerText;
6:
7: Console.WriteLine("The 2nd row, 1st cell text is {0}", cellText);
So here I just use the same technique that I used above to find elements of a given type (by using the provided generic methods) in order to find the 2nd row of the table (<TableRow>().ElementAt(1)) and the first cell (<TableCell>().ElementAt(0)). Then I just pull the value of the Cell object's InnerText property and it's done! Although there are other ways to use the SDK to get the same data, you can still see that with only a few lines of code, I'm able to do quite a bit without working directly in the underlying XML. And remember, we can do this type of manipulation WITHOUT running the client application (in this case Microsoft Word 2007).
The Office Client Developer Content team (my team) has some great examples on the MSDN web site here. Check it out!