Excel Chart looks poor in PowerPoint

[Gary McGill]

[Office 2003]

I have a long-standing problem that's driven me crazy for years. This is a
cry for help from a desperate man!

The problem I have, briefly, is that when I embed an Excel chart in a
PowerPoint presentation, it looks really bad because the text (e.g. category
labels) is rendered very poorly. Even when I use a standard font like Arial,
and even though it looks absolutely fine in Excel, it comes out blocky and
badly kerned when viewed in PowerPoint.

Its as if the chart has been rendered as a bitmap at screen resolution, and
then scaled slightly, so that all the anti-aliasing of the text goes horribly
awry. And yet, it's even worse than that, because the kerning of the
characters goes wrong too, so you get letters running into one another, or
big ugly gaps between letters.

I don't understand why I can't find any discussion of this on-line. It seems
like such a glaring problem, yet there's virtually no evidence that anyone
else has this issue. I've tried various different systems, and this has been
a consistent thorn in my side for years.

A solution would be nice, but first off - can anyone simply confirm that it
is a problem, and that I'm not going mad?

 

[PTTRUST]

How are you inserting it The way you import it can effect the graphics.
PDF's are particularly prone to degradation. If you are inserting the chart
directly from Excel try some different methods such as copy & paste, drag &
drop and the Insert Object option from the menu.

 

[Gary McGill]

Believe me, I've tried ALL the options. But to be honest, I don't think this
is the source of the problem.

I'm not sure what you mean about PDFs?

 

[PTTRUST]

Charts can be converted to Adobe Acrobat .pdf format and then inserted into
PowerPoint. What versions of PowerPoint and Excel are you using?

 

[Gary McGill]

2003 Pro SP3

 

[PTTRUST]

Not sure if you have had the problem prior to SP3 or not, but I have heard of
SP3 doing some weird things. You may try downloading the 2007 trial versions
of PPT & Excel and see if that solves the problem. Other than that I don't
have any further suggestions.

 

[Gary McGill]

Steve,

I've been very careful to avoid re-sizing in PowerPoint (I keep hitting the
Reset button on the Size tab of the Object Properties dialog). Yet it still
looks terrible.

The advice I'm getting elsewhere is similar but different to yours (copy &
paste as a picture). When taken with your advice (paste a link), the sum
total of all this advice seems to be: don't embed an Excel chart in a
PowerPoint presentation.

I find this depressing - if that's not the #1 reason for having the ability
to embed objects in the first place, what is?!

Thanks,
Gary