Science PowerPoint tips and tutorials

Excel is one of the preferred programs to create charts in science. Although copying them into a PowerPoint slide is easy, converting these charts into PowerPoint format, for the purpose of editing, may be somewhat cumbersome. There are several ways of editing Excel charts in PowerPoint. However, in order to modify it extensively in one would need to either go back to Excel and do editing there, or invoke Excel program while in PowerPoint and make the necessary changes still using Excel. Here we show how to quickly and completely convert copied charts into PowerPoint text and vector graphics. After this conversion you will have full control over each little graphical detail contained in the chart. It may be helpful if you familiarize yourself with PowerPoint briefly by reading “Setting up your personal workspace“, “Essential drawing tools I“, “Creating customized floating toolbars“, and “Essential drawing tools II“.

Figure 10. Typical data sheet and chart in Excel.

Lets start with Excel where you have just created chart which you want to use in PowerPoint presentation (Figure 10). Since we plan to do all editing in PowerPoint, it is not critical to label axes and legends or add titles in Excel. Only single thing which may be useful to do in Excel is vertical axis labeling. Also, any unwanted information such as bar numbering, which may appear in Excel, will be removed or edited later in PowerPoint. At this stage we just select and copy the chart, open PowerPoint presentation, select the slide we want to put it in, and paste the chart there (Figure 11). PowerPoint identifies the chart as an object and this shows by the lack of transparency of the background of incorporated chart.

Figure 11. Chart pasted into PowerPoint slide. Note the background imported with chart from Excel.

Next steps are very simple and straightforward. First select the chart by pointing the chart and clicking the left mouse button (immediately after pasting chart is already selected) and click Ungroup. PowerPoint will ask you if you want to convert this object into Microsoft Office drawing object and you click yes. Click Ungroup again and all lines and text should appear highlighted (Figure 12). At this point Excel chart is just a collection of lines and text and you have full control over any changes.
Click outside the chart to de-select and click again within the white (empty) area of the chart. Now you selected (highlighted) the background box (one of two) which needs to be removed by hitting Backspace (or Delete) key or clicking Cut button. You can remove external and inside box lines and inside chart background (second background box) by selecting them one by one and clicking Cut button.

Figure 12. Converted lines and text ready for editing in PowerPoint

You also can move legend inside the chart area by selecting it and dragging into place (Figure 13). After conversion some lines may appear as double lines and you may want to remove them individually. Finally, you may select all text boxes on each side of the chart to change the font size and position angle and change the color selection for data bars using Fill color tool. How to do all these steps we will show in the upcoming article on Editing Excel Charts in PowerPoint.

Figure 13. Excel chart after deleting background boxes and unnecessary lines. Note the uniform outlay of slide background throughout the chart.