Release Notes – empower® Charts 9.8

The .NET 8 variant of empower^® Charts is by now the preferred variant. As a reminder: It offers better performance (~20%) and requires a 64-bit version of Office and an installed .NET 8 Desktop Runtime.

Charts created or edited with version 9.8 can also be edited with older software versions 9.7 or 9.6. However, certain formatting will be lost, e.g. because older versions do not support partial text formatting. It is therefore recommended to roll out version 9.8 to all users promptly.

It is possible to continue editing older charts with version 9.8. These will be technically migrated upon first selection.

Labels (for data points, totals, or Gantt objects) can now also be formatted partially. For example, parts of a label can be displayed in bold. Free text can also be added directly to labels.

Custom colors can now be defined or picked from existing objects in PowerPoint using an eyedropper tool. Furthermore, custom colors can be managed, exported and imported.

In scatter and bubble charts, free lines or trend lines (for all points or those of a series) can be drawn and formatted.

Performance for very large line charts has been significantly improved. This particularly affects time axis charts, such as those showing stock price developments over a longer period. All operations (recoloring, inserting arrows, etc.) on such charts now work noticeably faster.

The Performance Mode is therefore now obsolete and has been removed.