I suppose the charting control in VBA is pretty complex; for me, it's one of the least intuitive parts of the object model.

But I've also found that only vary rarely do I need to resort to VBA for charting, and I can think of very few things I'd want to do to a chart  that couldn't be accomplished without code. Code being as hard as it is to write and understand, I always think you're better avoiding it wherever you can. Fortunately, Excel is so versatile that with a little creativity it's often possible to avoid VBA for entire days!