Office chart and graphic issues

[Stu Humphries]

I'm having some problems with compatibility of excel charts and
drawing objects inserted into word. When colleagues using PCs open the
files, the drawing objects lack shading (or crash word entirely) while
the charts seem to replace dashed lines with solid ones.

The chart issue sems to be a general Office 2004 mac issue as pasting
them into photoshop elements also results in loss of dashing.

Other options I've tried include converting to pdfs, but the images
seem 'soft' or 'fuzzy', and are not really acceptable for printing.

As an added extra, everytime I load office, it seems to corrupt my
submarine.aiff file in System:Library:Sounds.

Any help greatly appreciated!

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

Some features of Mac office just aren't available on the PC yet. You'll
run into troubles with soft shadows, for instance. Would you prefer to
let the PC side have all the new features and the Mac side always be in
a position to wait till they get to the Mac? I hope not!

Use the Office 2004 compatibility checker to remove the features that
are known to not work on PCs before you send copies of documents to PC
users.

One way to save a chart object as a picture that diplays all the fancy
formatting is to control-click on the entire graph and use the Save-As
feature. You can choose from several different file formats. This saves
the image at a 72dpi (dots per inch) resolution.

If you want a higher resolution image you can use the Save As Web Page
feature. In the web options you can designate a higher dpi. You'll get
alot of extraneous stuff, but included in the save-as files will be
image files of the graphs. The ability to control dpi works with charts
that are on worksheets, but graphs located as chart sheets are
unaffected and will always save at 72dpi when saved as a web page.

Hope this helps!

-Jim

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hey Stu, I'm Back!

I think I found a better and easier way to deal with the graphics.

Give this a try:

Copy the desired graph and paste into a blank PowerPoint slide. If you have
more than one to do use the Scrapbook feature (click the red toolbox button
on the toolbar).

Stretch the graph bigger so that it fits the full screen nicely.
Use PowerPoint's File > Save As > and choose either PNG or PICT
Click the Options button and adjust the dpi setting to 300 or higher. Click
OK then click Save.

PowerPoint will save the graph as a very good picture file. PNG format is
probably the best to use cross-platform. PNG will save up to 300 dpi. You
can save as PICT at higher resolutions, but you'll want to test the windows
folks with your PICT files because I'm not confident that all Windows users
will get good reproduction with PICT format. If you need larger or higher
resolution graphs use the PICT format and then use a graphic editor like
Photoshop or Graphic Converter to change the PICT into PNG or JPEG.
PowerPoint will save all the other formats at 72dpi (it's a bug and yeah,
they know).

Hope this helps you and anyone else who finds this posting.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

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