One problem arises when the number of rows covered by the chart is variable. When you have an update, you need to rely on VBA code to realign the chart, and this is not always reliable. To counter this (and to apply some “interesting” formatting requested by the client, I developed some VBA code that read values from each row and built chart using a series of rectangles and other shapes. These were aligned appropriately with the grid more simply and reliably than a chart would have been. A saple of this is shown in In Cell Charting with Shapes.

I ran into additional issues with another client who insisted that his worksheets be viewed at a zoom that filled the entire width of the screen. This has all kinds of negative issues, especially with charts. (And on my widescreen laptop, it needed a zoom of around 150%, so I had minimal rows visible. But a client is a client.) So I built some additional graphs based on Excel shapes, as illustrated in In Cell Bar Charts.

You could therefore add a fourth approach, though it isn’t accessible without code, and that is “Graphs using Graphical Objects”. This is after all how we all started with graphing data in second grade, with paper and crayons and perhaps a straightedge.