I’ve posted before about Excel’s handy camera tool. I don’t use it much, but I have one monster report that relies on it extensively. It contains code that uses the Shape object’s ScaleWidth method. I went to run the report yesterday and all my camera-generated-pictures got bigger. For reasons lost in the murk of time, I was setting the pictures’ ScaleWidth’s to 1, which made them adjust nicely when the range they point at changes size.

Anyways, all of a sudden the pictures got bigger when the code ran. So I came home and reproduced it on a different computer, without code. Sure enough, the same thing. Below I list a couple simple steps to demo the problem. Both machines I tested were Windows 7, Office 2010 SP2 with the latest patches on both:

First, take a picture of a range:

Second, right-click and choose Size and Properties (or Alt-JP-O for the mouse-averse). Note that the height and width are listed as 75% and the original size is listed as bigger than the current size:

Finally, hit the Reset button and see your picture magically grow! Note that the height and width are now shown as 100% and we’ve achieved the “Original Size”:

In my limited testing it seems to always be a factor of 75%. So now my code uses ScaleWidth 0.75. I set it as a Const, because talk about a magic number!

Anybody know the cure for this? I searched, and though the camera tool has a fairly rich history of bugs, I didn’t see this behavior mentioned anywhere.

P.S. I know that it’s really more than 33%.