Microsoft KB Archive/68402

Charts from Excel 3.00 Do Not Translate Correctly PSS ID Number: Q68402 Article last modified on 10-02-1991 PSS database name: W_PowerPt

2.00

WINDOWS

Summary:

A chart from Microsoft Excel version 3.00 will not translate correctly to PowerPoint for Windows when the PowerPoint for Windows presentation is converted to PowerPoint for the Macintosh format. A blank, unframed rectangle will be in the place of the Excel chart.

This problem will occur regardless of how the Excel 3.00 chart is placed on the slide. A blank rectangle will result if the chart is embedded into the presentation by choosing Insert from the File menu and selecting Excel Chart. This will also happen if the chart is copied onto the slide using the Clipboard.

More Information:

This problem is a result of Excel 3.00 putting something into the clipboard metafile that is not understood by the trnanslator.

There are a few workarounds to this problem.

  Copy the chart into to the clipboard as a bitmap. To do this you should select the chart in Excel and copy it to the clipboard by holding down the shift key and selecting the Copy Picture command from the Edit menu and then continuing to hold down the shift key as you choose the desired options from the Copy Picture dialog and click the OK button. Switch to PowerPoint and choose the Paste command to place the bitmap representation of the Excel chart into your presentation. Since the chart image is a bitmap (at screen resolution) it may not produce the desired output quality to a high resolution printer.   If you have Excel 2.10, you can save the Excel 3.00 chart out in the Excel 2.10 chart file format. You can then open the chart file in Excel 2.10, copy the chart to the clipboard and paste it into PowerPoint. Since Excel 2.10 does not support many of the chart types that are available in Excel 3.00, this may not be the desired workaround.   A good workaround is to use PowerPoint Graph instead of Excel for your chart. If you do not want to re-enter all of your data you can simply copy the contents of the supporting Excel worksheet into the datasheet of PowerPoint Graph. Or, if you will be making modifications to the data in the future, you can use the Import Data command in PowerPoint Graph to bring the contents of the worksheet into the PowerPoint Graph datasheet and creating a soft-link to the worksheet so that it is relatively easy to update the chart when the data changes. After the data has been imported into PowerPoint Graph, you can switch to the Chart window and choose the type of chart that you want to use. 

Microsoft is researching this problem and will post new information here as it becomes available.

Copyright Microsoft Corporation 1991.