First we'll get the easy part out of the way. The scaling controls are used to determine how the image acts when the space available for the graph changes. This can happen when you move from full graph to split graph modes, or resize the Worksheet by dragging one of its corners.

The Scale Font checkbox gives you the option of scaling the text that appears along with the graph (This is probably not such a good idea. Text seems to scale only width-wise, making it appear very wide-spaced.)

The Clip, Scale and Zoom options control how scaling of the graph proper will be done. Clip is equivalent to "no scaling". If the image doesn't fit, it will be cropped off. If it could be larger to make better use of the space -- it won't.

Scale and Zoom perform scaling, but in two different ways. The Scale option (the default) adjusts both the height and width of the image independently to make the best use of available space. The Zoom option scales the image proportionately (equally along height and width), fitting the entire image into the frame. This means that one dimension may wind up with extra blank space.

To see an example, try a graph question like "Show the unitprice of products" and click the Graph button. The graph should fill the frame. Now click the Clip radio button, and then the Split button. Half of the graph will be cropped out of view. Finally, click Zoom. This will resize the graph to fit, keeping its proportions. This leaves most of the bottom half of the graph panel empty.

The Print button can be used to start the process of printing a graph. Most often you'll want to hide the header and footer before printing, so you can trigger this button (when hidden) by pressing <Alt-P>. Although this button isn't present on the Graph 6 and BPS footer controls, any Worksheet graph can be printed by selecting File / Print from the Microsoft Access menu.

Note that using Print Preview will deactivate all the functions of the Worksheet, so please close the Worksheet immediately after using Print Preview. (Yes, this does make previewing quite a bit less useful.) You'll probably want to use other methods of printing record sets, but if you print grids directly from the Worksheet, it's advisable to widen the last column all the way to the window's edge, so that it will hide any Worksheet controls during the print.

The controls which limit by sorted order, sort by value (or by label), or filter by value (or by label) have one feature in common. They base their actions only on the graphed values or the included labels. However, the actual rows accepted for graphing can be pre-selected based on any columns in the Worksheet. For instance, let's ask "Show the price and units in stock for each product". We can click Chart to manually select the graph fields, then click just the UnitPrice and ProductName column headers. Although only this information will be graphed, we can first sort the grid by UnitsInStock (descending), then enter a value (such as 10) in the Restrict Rows dropdown. This ensures that we'll be seeing the UnitPrice and ProductName of only the 10 products with the most units in stock.

The graph controls work on this preselected set. To understand this, it's useful to look at what can't be done. The default order of the graph is the current Worksheet order, which is by UnitsInStock (larger above smaller in the grid, larger to the left of smaller (or beneath smaller, when horizontal) in the graph. We can't flip the order of the bars to run in the opposite way (using the footer controls) because the UnitsInStock values aren't part of this graph.

To reverse the order we'd have to use a three-step process in the grid: first sort descending on UnitsInStock, next Restrict to 10 rows, and finally sort (these 10 largest values) into ascending order. The accompanying (horizontal bar) graph will still be topsy-turvey from the grid order, but it will be just the opposite what we saw earlier.

Since the Top control operates based on the graphed values, let's look at what it can do. Depending on what we select in the Sort box, it will reorder the graph bars according either to bar length (Asc or Desc) or alphabetically by graph label. If "None" is selected, then choosing the Top N rows means choosing the first N rows in the grid (that is, the leftmost N vertical or bottom-most N horizontal bars in the graph).

The Filter control is a very potent tool for masking some, but allowing other rows of a graph to display.

Note: Because with MS Graph 5 you also have the ability to delete individual rows from a graph's datasheet (and thus from the graph), this next, rather complicated scenario may be more than you need to know. Changing or deleting from the MS Graph 5 datasheet doesn't affect the database, so it may be faster to simply "graph the whole thing" and selectively delete rows. Here we're talking about deleting from the window labelled "Access ELF Query Worksheet - Datasheet" which appears when MS Graph 5 is activated in-place (with View / Datasheet option).

This next technique can be used with the other graph styles, however; which do not support direct editing of a separate graph datasheet.

So for instance, in the preceding example, once we had a graph of the prices of the 10 products with the most units-in-stock, we might want to apply a highly specific filter to the graph. If our presentation happens to be on the high prices consumers will pay for products with fancy foreign names, we might want to limit our graph only to those products with an accent character in the ProductName. Wait! It's not that hard. To do this magic trick, we'll just need to type the following into the Filter box:

L Like "*[ö,â,é,è,ä,ø,ô,á,ß,ü]*"

This example illustrates pretty well the purpose of the filter mechanism. It allows you to pick out any subset of the graphed rows which meet some condition, a condition that is expressed in terms of either the data point or its label. In the expression, we can refer to the data value as "V" or the label as "L". (With graphs that have more than one data value, we'll use V, V2, V3 etc.)

The expression above checks that one of the accented characters listed appears within the label (L) of the row we're testing.

At the risk of veering into the ridiculous, we'll elaborate this example one step beyond. This chart compares the prices of the "foreign-name" products against each other, but what if we want to float these names to the top of a graph that includes other products, so we can visually test our theory that, among the most heavily stocked items, the ones with fancy sounding names command higher prices. To do this, we'll need to splice the "*[ö,â,é,è,ä,ø,ô,á,ß,ü]*" expression right into our SQL statement. Follow along. . .  First we type in:

Show the price and units in stock for each product

This generates the following SQL:

SELECT DISTINCT Products.UnitPrice, Products.UnitsInStock, Products.ProductName FROM Products;

Using the fact that our SQL panel is interactive, we can add a new field. Change the SQL so that it reads:

SELECT DISTINCT Products.UnitPrice, Products.UnitsInStock, Products.ProductName, Products.ProductName Like "*[ö,â,é,è,ä,ø,ô,á,ß,ü]*" As Foreign FROM Products;

Press Enter to execute the modified statement.

Click Chart so the Graph Selected Columns button appears. Click the UnitPrice, ProductName and Foreign column headers to select them for the graph. Place the cursor in the UnitsInStock column (not the header), then click the Sort Descending icon on the Access button bar. Enter 30 in the Restrict Rows box and press Enter. Move the cursor to the Foreign column, and again click the Sort Descending icon.

When we click Graph (or Split), we'll see the prices of the 30 most heavily stocked products, with the "foreign-sounding" items pushed to the top. Is our theory confirmed? Not at all! This may have saved us from making a costly marketing error.