The Secret to Inserting High Resolution Excel Charts in Powerpoint
By: Tessica Dall
Tags: Charts, PowerPoint, Excel, Data, Data Visualization

The Secret to Inserting High Resolution Excel Charts in Powerpoint

So you’re presenting your insights to your Executive team. The stakes are high. You’ve created a Powerpoint slide deck that is worthy of a graphic design award. Now you need to insert a bunch of Excel charts into a Powerpoint presentation? Great! Except now you have a choice to make — take a screen snip and insert the charts as pictures with the inevitable loss of resolution or paste the charts as is and run the risk that anyone who gets their hands on the file will access the confidential data underneath, or worse, modify the original files!

High resolution chart — tick. But, all the underlying data, even data not in the chart, even the rough workings and ugly unformatted charts are exposed for all to see and modify!! No. Just No.

You could recreate the chart in Powerpoint, but that’s double handling. You could strip back your Excel file to the bare essentials, but you haven’t got the time for that and what if I have to update the data in a month? The struggle is real!

If you’re like me, you’ve spent way too many hours Googling ‘high res screenshot’. You’ll find all sorts of promises online. Does the Print Screen and Paint combo ring any bells? Sure it’s a decent option and the resolution is better than Ctrl-C Ctrl-V, but seriously — PrtScn, Open, Paste, Save, Insert, Browse, OK, Crop. That’s 8 steps! Per Chart! I have patience for maybe two steps, at best.

Why doesn’t Microsoft provide a simple solution to copying charts between their own products? Surely data geeks have been asking for it for long enough? How did they miss the memo?!

Image by OcusFocus via iStockPhoto

Well turns out they have given us a built-in solution! They’ve just done their best to make it hard to discover and haven’t told us about it!

Wait till you find out how ridiculously simple it is! You’ll be kicking yourself you didn’t think of this option sooner. I am!

It’s just 1.1 steps! Why the 0.1 you ask? Well the second step you only need to do once to fix all your charts at once!

Here’s what you do..

Step 1

Create your amazing chart in Excel, using all the best practice data viz techniques and copy and paste into Powerpoint keeping your source formatting (why we would ever trust Powerpoint to overwrite over Excel formatting beats me, but that’s an aside).

I know, I know… Your data is fully exposed at this point. All the Excel files are still embedded in the Powerpoint… Patience my friend, we’ve not quite done…

Step 1.1

Break links. That’s it. Super simple!

P.S. You’ll find the break links option under File>Info

Don’t trust me that it worked? Check this out…

All the chart formatting and styling buttons remain active (so you can make some last minute adjustments if needed or your manager says something like ‘Can you make that a line chart instead?’, but the Select Data and Edit Data options are greyed out.

If you circulate your presentation to others, there is no danger of them accessing your underlying data (or seeing the messy of your data workings).

You’re welcome.