Forum Discussion

ordnance1

Copper Contributor

Jul 02, 2020

Modern Charts

Is there a reason that charting in Access can not be on par with Excel.

access

Charts

Simon_dAspley

Copper Contributor

Aug 22, 2022

Sadly, ordnance1, once upon a time, Access had pivot tables and pivot charts. They were quick, comprehensive and easy to use... then they were gone. The monthly chart packs we had deeply integrated with the the Access app had to be recreated in Excel and the process and the final solution was just awful.

Modern Charts don't even come close. After 4 solid weeks of effort we still can't get the charts to work reliably with Azure SQL queries and so we've returned to the OLE-driven Excel / Power Query approach.

Let's hope things improve, now that Access provides a viable frontend for Azure databases.

Karl_Donaubauer

MVP

Aug 23, 2022

Hi,

As people see that the announced enhancements of modern Access charts do not happen for years, alternatives are being worked on. Daniel has already mentioned one in 2020: The integration of really modern and powerful Javascript frameworks.

Thomas Moeller offers it for free not only for static charts, but in his new project also for pivot charts. See my interview with him and the links to his projects below the video on Youtube.

Servus
Karl
Access News
Access DevCon

Simon_dAspley
Copper Contributor
Aug 24, 2022
Hi Karl_Donaubauer,

Thanks for this. I have been exploring Thomas' Better Access Charts. They're excellent, but sadly miss the settings necessary for changing the font sizes on the axes. I've played with the code (as suggested by Thomas) but it's complicated. I have no experience of Chart JS, or any JS, for that matter... so it's been a steep learning curve.

Our preference would have been Microsoft just restoring (and updating) the pivot and charting functions... but alas, no hope of that.

Thank you for the suggestion though.