Who are the folks who miss the Pattern Fills? And why are the Pattern Fills so special?
John: Mostly, they seem to be people who need to print diagrams and charts in black & white. The pattern fills make it much easier to identify parts of the diagram and usually print out much clearer than textures and gradients. Everyone that writes in now wants to know how to get pattern fills in graphs in 2007! So far I dont think this can be done as the object model doesnt expose the new graphing engine. One answer is to switch back to the old MS Graph from earlier versions of PowerPoint temporarily. You can do this with a registry hack. Steve (Rindsberg) has a tutorial on his site here.
