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Please help: Charts from Excel to Word blurry (Office 2011)

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cntwtfrmynwmbp

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 21, 2012
67
0
Hey there,

the deadline for my MA thesis is approaching and I'm desperately trying to solve this issue.

Whenever I copy a chart from Excel to Word, it is very blurry. You can't almost read the text in the charts anymore. (MS Office 2011, 10.10.2, MBPR)

As a matter of fact, any picture that I'm inserting into Word comes out pretty unsharp.

I've tried copy + paste and then insert as picture. I've tried to save as a picture from Excel and then "file > insert content" (cmd + ^ + v). I've tried to mess around with "file > reduce file size" to disable the compression of pictures but that didn't work out either.

I've searched the internet extensively but most solutions are for Windows.

Does anybody have an idea? Any help is very much appreciated.

Sorry for my English, it's not my first language.
Best regards

Edit: some other things: Sharpness gets better if I export to pdf. But still not as sharp as in Pages! But I don't want to use Pages as there is no possibility to insert an index of figures.
 
Last edited:
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campyguy

macrumors 68040
Mar 21, 2014
3,413
957
Word 2011 is a bit of a finicky beast when it comes to images, and your situation also depends on what type of image is the "default" for your System Clipboard, which by default is the PNG format. I'll cut to it, since you're pressed for time...

If the image is "fuzzy" or "blurry", I'd guess that Word is pasting the image in the TIFF format, and you need to keep in mind that the "fuzzy" image you're looking at is really just a proxy image, not the actual image that is pasted in your document. I used QuarkXPress for years and had to deal with that until a developer came out with an Xtension to render the visual on the screen closer to the actual image.

I recommend printing out the single page in Word with the image(s) you're having issues with and look at the printed page and check it to see if it's what you are wanting. A TIFF file can look terrible on a screen and great when it's printed out.

There are utilities to change the default file type of Clipboard images (like Onyx) or the use of Terminal commands.

A workaround: in Excel, Control-Click (or Right-Click) on the chart you want to copy, and choose the Save Picture option - and save the image with the PNG format where you need to (preferably the same folder your Word file is). Switch to Word, and Insert the image file you just created.

That should get you on your way. I was using Excel 4, Cricket Graph, DeltaGraph 2, and Word 5.1 while working on my engineering degrees - you have NO IDEA how easy you have it... :D
 
C

cntwtfrmynwmbp

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 21, 2012
67
0
campyguy said:
A workaround: in Excel, Control-Click (or Right-Click) on the chart you want to copy, and choose the Save Picture option - and save the image with the PNG format where you need to (preferably the same folder your Word file is). Switch to Word, and Insert the image file you just created.
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot!! This did work out! I've saved the chart as png and then inserted into Word as photo. Although the charts still look fuzzy on the screen, they are sharp when printed out!

Thanks again!!
 
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