Interactive zooming in and out on Charts in Microsoft Excel
If you have an XY scatter chart with a lot of data points in Microsoft Excel or even using an XY scatter chart mimicking a map in Excel, an interactive zooming function (allowing to magnify user-defined parts of the chart) can be very helpful.
Microsoft Excel does not provide such a feature natively. There have been a few workarounds published. Most of them use interactive controls like spinners or sliders to change the axes scales with OFFSET formulas and dynamic cell ranges or by VBA.
A more intuitive way of zooming into a chart would be to select an area on the chart with the mouse and zoom exactly into this user-defined part of the chart (or map).
We recently had a couple of posts taking advantage of Andy Pope’s stellar idea to use a label control on top of a chart for interactive chart features:
Another Technique for Interactive Excel Charts
Selecting and Highlighting Areas on Excel Charts
Select Areas on a USA Map in Microsoft Excel
Andy’s technique is very versatile and can be a viable solution for many different use cases, including the requirement of an interactive zooming feature.
Today’s post describes an implementation of an interactive zooming feature for a map (XY scatter chart) in Microsoft Excel. As always, the workbook is provided for free download.