What can be done about all the wasted space from legends?

[#1]

For some reason, legends require a large amount of blank space under them on a chart (pie charts in my case).  If you size down the height of the chart, the legend quickly turns into a scroll-able legend even though there is plenty of space to display the whole the legend.  It's like the bottom 1/3 of the chart area must be wasted for some reason.  I read about using Text on Chart and Text boxes in lieu of the built in legend but manually created static legends are not ideal either.  Is there anyway to control this?  Failing that, can it be controlled programmatically?

[#2]

I figured out a workaround for this.  I'm not sure if this applies to all charts or just pie charts that I'm working on. 

The viewable legend height appears to be controlled by the pie object's height.  This is not the height of the overall chart, but the height of the box that contains the pie when you CTRL-SHIFT to show the red box outlines of the all the objects in the chart.  Changing the box for the legend doesn't do anything, however, increasing the height of the pie chart box causes the viewable legend height to increase as well, even though, at least in my case, changing the pie object box doesn't cause any size change in the pie itself.