Poor quality of Excel chart 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?

 

[Jon Peltier]

This can be problematic. I've found the best results when the chart is
exactly the size in Excel it needs to be to fit where you want it in the
slide, without any resizing.

I usually use Copy-Picture (hold shift while clicking on the Edit menu),
then I pick the on screen and picture options. PowerPoint 2003 is pretty
good at rendering a bitmap too, even if it is rescaled.

- Jon

 

[Gary McGill]

Jon,

Thanks - I'm glad to at least hear someone acknowledge that there's an
issue. I'm trying to get slides that look professional, but I could do a
better job in MsPaint.

I've tried to make sure that there's no re-sizing going on (I keep hitting
the "Reset" button on the Size tab of the Object Properties dialog in
PowerPoint), but it doesn't seem to help. I also tried re-sizing the chart in
PowerPoint to see if there was a "magic" size, but I tried everything from
80% to 120% with no luck.

I may have to resort to using a bitmap, but I really would prefer to embed
the chart - not least because I have some charts that are interactive.

IN THEORY, embedding the chart should give better results (especially when
printed) because it can be rendered at any resolution. However, from what I
can tell, PowerPoint isn't asking Excel to re-render the chart - it seems to
be using a preview-like bitmap of the chart, and just scaling it (badly). Do
you happen to know where I can find out the full story behind what PowerPoint
is actually doing?

It strikes me as incredible that the results of embedding a chart would be
so poor - it must have been a fair bit of work for MS to get this whole
embedding thing to work, but why bother if the results are unusable?

Thanks,
Gary