Fix for PowerPoint 2007 Chart Freeze.

The short version: if you’ve been having problems editing charts in PowerPoint 2007, try this HotFix from Microsoft.

In detail: Charting and PowerPoint have a cloudy history no one wants to peer too closely into. There are sporadic reports of having crashes or problem hangs when trying to edit charts (happening when people double click into charts or right click an attempt a contextual selection). Program more often than not hangs indefinitely rather than outright crashing.

From various forums I’ve seen, the problem creeps up as a result of diligent maintenance, affecting people with SP3 (Service Pack 3) for Windows XP, and SP2 (Service Pack 2) for Office 2007. One option for some has been to rollback the SP2 update. I don’t think anyone would recommend rolling back a system software Service Pack and I’m loathe uninstall unless something is causing serious performance issues, so I tried the HotFix. I’ve had three different machines with this problem, and it’s resolved it each time.

On one machine (the oldest – a laptop without dedicated graphics and a small amount of RAM) I still get an error message about closing active Excel windows. The resolution there is counterintuitive: I launch Excel before I try to make edits, and that works fine. I’ve suspected all along the problem is not dissimilar to one PowerPoint users have seen for over a decade: the vaunted OLE model — which would open a process of an independent executable inside your current application. Allow me a that cludgy explanation, but basically instead of running MS Chart (which was an independent program as well), PowerPoint would launch Excel inside of PowerPoint, allowing for higher end chart functions, and a consistent presentation format. Of course, it was introduced back when most no one tried to run those programs simultaneously. And even though gobs of RAM and generational leaps of processing power are widely available, it seems we might never escape the clutches of this cranky interaction.