hey there

i battled through my msc using excel to generate charts for word, but now i'm busy with my phd and its just too much! word keeps on resizing the charts, the text, arrgh! any ideas on good chart programs? please! my laptop will thank you for not getting thrown out the window.

cheers
mark

How are you importing your Excel charts? There is more than one way and some ways work well and others don't! If you describe the way you're currently doing it, I might be able to recommend an alternative method...

I use matlab, the quality is so much better!

at the moment i copy and paste as a worksheet. that way i can resize the text to how i want it (not possible if you paste as a picture). the proceedure goes like this. format picture, resize, 7.0x7.5cm. open the worksheet, resize the text. close, see the text is different, open again, resize again. close, check size of picture, 7.9x7.7cm, resize picture, see text is changed again...sound familiar?
i think i'll have to give matlab a shot, will tinker a bit this weekend cause i havent used it yet. any other ideas?

I've had no problems using the following method: First, make sure your font size (axis labels etc) are a decent size (Arial 18, for eg). Also, you can thicken the axis lines and increase the thickness of the markers and/or joining lines so that, when reduced, they still look good. Then make sure you have your Excel file open at the worksheet containing your graph (NB not an embedded chart, make the chart a whole page in Excel). Then in Word, go to INSERTOBJECTCREATE FROM FILE then browse for your Excel file (the one you have open). It should appear looking good and you should be able to edit from within Word if necessary. I usually insert the file into a single cell table within Word too, helps to keep it centred etc. Good luck.

The arrows were omitted from my sequence which should have looked more like INSERT- OBJECT- CREATE FROM FILE etc

I used something called gnuplot (for windows)

Ann, this is amazing!!! Just tried your version and it looks spot on! And there wa me working with 20 different programs to get a worse result.

H, I used MatLab as well when i was having problems with Excel. You're definitely right, the quality was so much better.

I love that you can write a mini program in Matlab to read 100s of files and automatically generate the exact plot you want for each set of data.

I'm so glad I found Matlab in my first year

Glad it helped Oz