Panel alignment allows you to visually align the content areas of charts, legends and titles. It is useful when you're building reports with multiple chart/legend/title areas per control. In such cases it is common for the user to expect to see vertically or horizontally adjacent charts to be aligned by their plot area instead of their content area. The following pictures illustrate that:

Chart With Aligned Areas

 

Chart With Aligned Content Areas

On the above pictures the first chart has two chart areas which are left aligned (the areas include the chart plot and area occupied by docked axes). As a result the plot areas of the two charts are not horizontally aligned, because the Y axis labels of the two charts differ in size, which results in a different offset for the plot from the left side of the chart area. The second chart shows the effect of panel content alignment  - in this case the chart areas are not left aligned, however the plot areas of the two charts are, which results in a more readable chart.

Enabling Content Area Alignment

Initially content area alignment is disabled - to enable this feature you need to go Chart Properties\Layout. On this property page there are two groups of controls relevant to panel content alignment:

- Content Alignment

Allows you to select the sides to align chart/legend/title panels - possible options are left, right, top and bottom.

- Includes Content Areas

Allows you include / exclude panels from content alignment based on their type (chart/legend/title).

Excluding Panels From Content Area Alignment

After you enable alignment for one or more sides you may wish to exclude particular panels so that they don't align their content with the other panels. To achieve this you need to go to the Layout page of that panel and uncheck the Allow Left Align, Allow Right Align, Allow Top Align or Allow Bottom Align check boxes. When unchecked the panel will not regard content alignment settings for the specified side and will retain its original, non aligned position.