Terry, IMHO you are 'way overcomplicating this.
I saw the original post - started from a point of absolute ignorance - but was interested (in a geeky sort of way:) - spent 3+ hours googleing around and searching the message area - and came up blank.

The three items were not a solution - just the first foray into the question by your humble narrator! I gave up!
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>1) Copy Chart Area and Paste Special to report (all cached)
>2) Copy Chart Area, Save as BMP, and append general (Cache and Disk a record for each chart)

>3) Copy Chart Area, make it an object (DEFINE WINDOW) and modify general (cached and disk but would only need a one record GENERAL field)
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>
>#3 works perfectly well and has for ages.
I could not, for the life of me (3 Hrs on google and pay-as-you-go-sample-code-site free trailers make it. Could you share some sample code on item #3.

Lets say the selected.chart.area is in the clipboard. How is the Window defined, how is the clipboard associated with the defined Window, and how does "modify general" put it in a general field?

>If we could automate VFP, like we do Excel (maybe we can) -and drive the menus it would be great but the VFP Object does not present (or so it seemed) methods or properties to do this.
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>Then what's SYS(1500) (also been around for ages) <s>?
I did not know that! Thank you Lisa!

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>However, it's irrelevant here.
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>#3 works well, does not write to disk, and does not require any interactive action or user intervention or menu handling, during a report run.
>

# 3 was just a speculation on my part - I have never "Defined Window" - and it took a lot of foot work to get there - so you can see, my intentions were honerable?

I beat on it for an hour (or so) - net result zero. It would be neat to see how it is coded!