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Jamie Garroch (MVP)Flag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Why do manually edited chart data values appear as [VALUE] in PowerPoint 2010?

I have some charts that have been created directly within PowerPoint 2016 using Insert / Chart.

I then had a request to include the data labels for each point in the series along with their units. So I manually edited each data point to firstly disable text wrap and then add the units "pF" as a suffix to the auto-created value as shown in this example:

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But when the PPTX file is opened with PowerPoint 2010, the data values are replaced by [VALUE] as shown here:

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Is there a way of achieving what I want in 2010 without hiding the auto-created data labels and manually adding each label as non-data-linked text boxes?
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Echo_S
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2010 doesn't really support custom data values with text (unless something has changed recently) it was introduced in 2103

Be careful because any "Fix" in 2010 will probably break the label. By this I mean - Add text to the value in whatever way - it looks fine. Change the value of the series in the data table and the data label will most likely not update to show the change.
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@Echo Good resource URL as always. I suspected there was a way of using the number string formatting codes for data labels but didn't find it in the PowerPoint UI. I realise that this is because the "Number" menu in the Chart formatting pane is collapsed by default. There's so many parameters to a chart.

So, I did what you suggested by using the "pF" suffix in the number format and that worked great in 2016. As soon as I opened the deck in 2010, I got the "[VALUE]" issue again. So I tried formatting in 2010 (given it's possible in the UI, one would expect it to be "supported"!). That worked in that the "pF" suffix was added but it wrapped the data label text and disabling that doesn't appear to be supported in 2010 (the Autofit and Internal Margin settings in the Alignment section of the Format Data Labels dialog in 2010 are all greyed out). I think the reason it doesn't work the other way is that 2016 is using some of these settings e.g. Wrap text, which then breaks the data label shape in 2010.

Conclusion : It's not possible to do what the client wants in 2010!

@JSRWilson : I didn't see a disconnection of the data label value wrt to the underlying table during my testing in either version.
Yeah, I actually had email about this fairly recently, but of course I can't find it right now! I was thinking that if you add the text in 2010, it doesn't break when you move to 2016 and back. But I can't recall. :-(