One of the most annoying parts of Excel!

However I think if MS is going to handle more than 2^16 the app is going to crawl anyways and I am better off using other utilities mentioned above :)

If you are really looking for a quick solution. I would suggest that you look into Pivot charts! (I am assuming you are creating the charts in Excel and not in Perl). Pivot charts can handle "external data" and it does not have a row limitation as long you do NOT display more than 2^16 rows in the pivot chart filter

cheers

SK