Just Plain Data Analysis Companion Site and Excel 2007
Gary Klass is a member of the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. He is the author of the book titled "Just Plain Data Analysis: Finding, Presenting, and Interpreting Social Science Data". Of special note, in the companion website for the book Gary provides a summary of the charting differences between Excel 2003 and Excel 2007.
Because we still use Excel 2003 at work I've still not made the change to Excel 2007. Gary notes in his list of differences between Excel 2003 and 2007 that the macro recorder in Excel 2007 does not work on chart objects. As a result it is necessary to record macros with 2003 to use them in 2007. When I read that I immediately referenced John Walkenbach's book titled Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA for a confirmation. John notes on page 574 that "Microsoft downgraded macro recording for charts to the point where it's virtually useless". I didn't realize that until now, and the unavailability of macro recording for charts in Excel 2007 will probably sway me against upgrading for a very long time.
I don’t think Microsoft intentionally downgraded the macro recorder. I think they just didn’t have the resources to incorporate the new shapes object model into the macro recorder in the time they had to get ready to release Office 2007. The elements (shapes) comprising the charts are now part of the new 2007 Office Art library. Some chart actions are recorded by the 2007 recorder, but no shapes actions are recorded, and no actions in a chart that formats the new shapes are recorded.
Effectively, however, one must use Excel 2003’s recorder. The documentation for the 2007 shapes, especially in their role as chart elements, is particularly dismal.