I have recently upgraded to Office 2013 from Office 2010. Chart templates that used to work fine in Excel 2010 no longer work in Office 2013, and it appears to be related to multiple fields for the category (x-axis) labels. In other words it is not the templates, but instead how Excel 2013 treats certain graph configurations.
Error message: "This template can't be applied. It's either damaged or won't work for the selected chart. Please try recreating it."
How to replicate the issue:
First, create a graph that contains two fields for the Category labels. An example might be a city and building ID. (This is a simple example. I understand the same template problem applies to pivot-charts where the date is grouped by month, such that the year becomes the second category field.)
Second, select the graph and try to apply any template to it (rt. click > change chart type > templates). When I do this in Office 2013, all template options are grayed out and unavailable. This is lost/broken functionality...I was able to apply templates to this type of graph using Office 2010 (and co-workers using Office 2010 still do).
I do not believe this is a problem with the templates. I believe this has to do with how Office 2013 treats graphs having more than one field in the x-axis labels. If I use the Select Data feature to remove one of the fields from the x-axis, only then can I apply a template to the graph.
I hope this information is helpful in finding a fix to restore this functionality. We have built processes that rely on the chart templates, so this bug will delay some of our team from upgrading to Office 2013.
Thanks,
Ken
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