Science PowerPoint tips and tutorials

After complete conversion of Excel graph into PowerPoint vector graphics as described in the preceding article, you can easily change and reposition any graphical element in the chart. Here we will show how to resize the legend box, how to label graph axes and rotate and align text labels for both horizontal and vertical axes. It may be helpful if you familiarize yourself with PowerPoint briefly by reading Converting Excel charts into PowerPoint vector and text graphics.

The graph legend, which after conversion appeared somewhat small as shown in Fig. 14, may require some adjustments. Using mouse pointer, first select the entire legend box.

Figure 14. Converted Excel chart in PowerPoint with selected legend box.

Click Format from menu bar and select AutoShape at the bottom of pull down menu. A dialog box will appear on the screen as shown in Fig. 15. Select Size tab, check lock aspect ratio box and type 200% in Height box. The Width entry will adjust proportionally. Click Preview to see if the box size has increased sufficiently and OK if satisfied with the result.

Figure 15. Format AutoShape dialog box for resizing selected objects.

Figure 16 shows the result of doubling the size of the legend box. Note that text has not changed; you will have to change it using text resizing command, if necessary. To enhance the aesthetic appearance of the legend box you may want to remove its background box. As described before for removing the chart background, click outside the legend box to de-select, click again somewhere within the white area and tap the backspace key to delete it.

Figure 16. Chart with enlarged legend box.

To better align text with colored rectangles select both rectangles with mouse pointer and using arrow keys move it up and to the right. The final result will look like shown in Fig. 17.

Figure 17. Chart with finished editing of legend box.

Adding and changing axis titles are similarly straightforward tasks. To add vertically-oriented title to Y axis, first type in text in a regular horizontal text box, for example Cell adhesion (arbitrary units), click the border of the text box to get out of the text editing mode, and click Rotate Left 90° button in the Drawing bar at the bottom of PowerPoint window. Finally, using mouse pointer position the now vertically oriented text into place next to Y axis and adjust text font size if necessary. The final result will look like shown in Fig. 18.

Figure 18. Chart with Y-axis title.

Sometimes labels to chart data columns are too long to be positioned horizontally. In such cases it is customary to position them at a 45° angle so they clearly point to correct data sets. To do so it is important to have each single label as a separate text box. When chart is converted from Excel this is done automatically. Figure 12 in the previous article demonstrates this case. When typing your own labels make each column label as a separate text box. At this point do not worry about the alignment – you will do all fine adjustments later. First, using mouse pointer select all text boxes at the bottom of chart simultaneously. From the Format menu select AutoShape (when converted from Excel) or Text box (when typing your own text labels). This difference is because after conversion from Excel PowerPoint still recognizes text boxes as AutoShapes. After selecting Format AutoShape or Format Text box you will see the same dialog box shown in Fig. 15. In the shown Rotation box you can rotate clockwise or counterclockwise by using up or down arrows next to this box. Rotate counterclockwise to -45° and click OK. The result of text rotation is shown in Fig. 19.

Figure 19. Chart with X-axis labels rotated -45°.

Note that because the length of each text box in different, labels are not distributed evenly. To position them evenly select all text boxes simultaneously again and use two align commands: distribute horizontally and align top. These commands should be found in the drawing bar at the bottom, as described in Essential Drawing Tools I, or selected from Draw pull down menu at the bottom of PowerPoint screen. After this fine tuning is complete, the fully edited Excel chart should look as shown in Fig. 20. You can also apply this technique to label your gel lanes.

Figure 20. Fully edited Excel chart in PowerPoint.