[ms office - 2010] Complex Charts in Excel Lose Formatting On Close

[LosOjos]

Struggling to find an answer to this one on Google so hoping someone here can help.

 

I've set up some complex charts in Excel which contain 7 different series. I'm trying to recreate the gauge charts as seen in the FFT dashboard.

 

When they work, they look great:

 

 

However, I am having a really annoying issue that when I reopen the document, the formatting gets screwed up and the "needles" z-order changes, obscuring them like so:

 

 

The "fix" is a real faff - I have to edit each series, toggling them from primary to secondary axis an unspecified number of times, then reformat them. There's really no system to this; sometimes it works first time, sometimes it takes 2 or 3 attempts to put them right. Every time the formatting gets screwed and has to be readjusted.

 

I can't do this every time I update the document, it takes too long and completely defeats the object of making these in the first place (other schools I have seen make the gauges in Illustrator and paste them in - I thought I'd be clever and set it up in Excel so I can just drop in the figures and job done, but now I think I'm wasting my time!

 

Any ideas?

 

 

 

PS: for those that are interested, there are doughnut charts for the red/green bands and the labels, and pie charts for the "needles", plus a couple of shapes dropped behind to make it look like a speedometer.

[LosOjos]

I ended up coming up with a workaround for this which isn't perfect but got the job done; I made the red/green bands a very vivid colour with high transparency. Resulting print out was almost the same colour as original (not that it really mattered) but importantly you could see the needles through it, so that'll do for now unless someone finds a "proper" fix.

 

Next annoyance is that it appears Excel can't manage to print what it shows on screen they all came out like this on print outs:

 

 

For the time being I've just removed the gauge style border as these were needed for an afternoon meeting, but I won't let it beat me!