I am displaying a 2D column chart with a legend at the bottom of the chart. The entire height of the chart is about 350 pixels. The bottom legend takes up about 50 pixels, leaving the remaining pixels presumably for the columns (the actual chart) to appear above it....however for some unknown reason, the control is squeezing the column chart into the top 50 pixels of the remaining area. so i end up with a column chart that has the bars squeezed into a very tiny vertical area (about 50 pixels), 200 pixels of white space, and then the legend at the bottom. When i move the legend to the RIGHT, it appears to resolve the issue and the bar chart expands vertically to consume much more of the available area...but when i move the legend to either the bottom or top, it exhibits this behavior. I can't seem to locate a property that i can use to control this. (on the pie charts there's a propery called "radius factor" or something like that which essentially sizes the pie chart in a flexible manner). On this column chart, i need the legends on the bottom due to the length of the text, so displaying it on the right or left is not an option. thanks for any advice you can offer.
The area you speak of may be reserved for the column labels and series labels. I would play with the Axis.X.Extent property to see if it resolves your issues.
hmmm...that appears to work. The default value for the X Axis Extent was 80, but as i reduced it from 80 down to about 30, the columns consumed more of the vertical area on my chart as i wanted them to. Can you explain a little more about how the EXTENT property controls this ? it doesn't seem logical to me for a few reasons...first of all i'm modifying something called the Extent under the X Axis, yet doing so changes the height of the Y axis...another thing that's confusing is that i had turned off all of my x-axis labels (including the labels for the "series") ..i would think the chart would recognize that there are no labels being displayed on the x-axis and therefore expand the chart vertically to consume that space that is unused. ? thank you for the quick response...i'm just hoping to understand a little more about this solution.
A couple of things. The extent is the distance from the item to the border. Once you set a smaller extent on the x axis, it comes closer to the edge of the chart area and thereforefore the y axis grows to adjust to the change. The other setting you can make is the margin, near and far. This would control the distance that the points of the axis is from the edges. So setting the near margin on the x axis would start the x axis at a later point. This property is a little confusing at first as I have to think about it sometime also.
For the second question, the chart when drawing is following the properties that are set, extent of 80. The labels although they do not exist should not affect this. If they were there the labels have their own rules with which they render. Say you did want that white space, if it adjusted based on the contents, it would be not possible. Also, the reason you see a difference with the pie chart is that there is no axis being used.