Poor quality copy-paste graphics from Excel

[EFruits]

I have a new PowerBook G4 on which I installed Office 2004. I have
found that graphics (e.g., charts) produced in Excel 2004 look
terrible when pasted anywhere--Word, PowerPoint, Graphic Converter,
etc. Even using the new "Save as Picture ..." option yield
low-quality graphics.

What I mean by "low quality" is that the lines on the graphic elements
are fuzzy and the typefaces are fuzzy. It does not matter whether the
graphics are color-intensive, grayscale, or bw.

Here are some clues the indicate the problem is with Excel 2004:

- If I open the file in Excel X and copy-paste, it works OK (even if
the chart was first created in Excel 2004). This is not a good
solution because my machine no longer has Office X installed on it.

- If I open the file in Excel 2000 (for PC) and copy-paste, it works
OK (even if the chart was first created in Excel 2004 for Mac). This
is not a good solution because of the well-documented "Red X" problem
between PC and Mac versions of Word.

I've talked to MS tech support who have given the following
work-around:

1. Place the object in its own worksheet ("Location ... | As new
sheet)

2. Drag the worksheet to a new workbook

3. Save the 1-sheet workbook as Excel 4.0 Chart

4. Open the Excel 4.0 Chart, then copy and paste

Naturally the big drawback to this workaround is that (a) it's time
consuming, and (b) generates a separate file for each chart.

I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this bug/feature and, if
so, if they can recommend any solutions.

Thanks.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

I think you're running into a bug that bit Microsoft and others when
MacOSX suddenly shifted from Adobe's level 2 down to level 1 (Postscript?).

Microsoft made modifications to the graph engine in Office 2004 to get
around this problem.

If Apple & Adobe were to get together and put level 2 into OSX then your
v.X problem will vanish. However, please don't hold your breath for
this event.

-Jim

 

[Stan Hadley]

I have struggled with similar problems over the years trying to get
good-looking graphs from Excel on a Mac into Word that will look good on a
Mac or PC. I finally went to selecting the graph, copying, pasting from the
clipboard into Graphic Converter, saving as a .png file, and then inserting
as a file into Word. Jim Gordon and I had a discussion about different ways
In Excel 2004 back in September. You can find it by searching for my name in
this newsgroup or going to the Google search

<http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&threadm=BD7072BA.64FA%hadleysw%
40ornl.gov&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dhadley%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26group%3Dmicr
osoft.public.mac.office.excel%26selm%3DBD7072BA.64FA%2525hadleysw%2540ornl.g
ov%26rnum%3D1>

Hope this helps,

Stan Hadley

 

[Clive Huggan]

Thanks, Stan -- that's kind of you!

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
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