Textboxes and "Paste as picture"

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Guest

Hi all.

I'm having a problem when I take a chart from Excel and past it into Word.
I use Paste Special - Picture because otherwise it will embed the whole Excel
file into the Word document.

My problem is that my textboxes get re-arranged somehow through the pasting
process. The wrapping is different and I end up with a bunch of white space
at the bottom of the box. Does anyone know why this happens and if there's
anything I can do to fix it?

I'm using Excel and Word 2000 with SP3.

Thanks!

Eric
 
Eric,

Before copying you chart as a picture, try grouping the text boxes and the
chart together first. To do so, hold down the shift key, select the text
boxes, and then select the edge of the chart. Right-click on you mouse and
select Grouping -> Group.

To easily group textboxes in an embedded chart, I've found that it's easier
to create the textbox in the spreadsheet and then drag the textboxes into
position in the chart. Do not cut and paste them into the chart.

Also, you may need to work with the order of the text boxes and the chart.
You will need to order the textboxes in front of the chart. To order each
textbox, click on the edge of the textbox, right-click on your mouse, and go
to Order -> Bring to Front.
 
Hi Eric -

Been there, done that.

We've got some fairly complex documents - 30+ charts, 10+ tables in 30
pages - that were built similarly, but we were importing WMF files
instead of pictures from Excel, but if you know both you should also
know that there wasn't much difference.
Under Win95/Office 6, this worked fairly well. Under NT/2k/XP and
Office 97/2k/XP, it was a catastrophe: the 16-bit WMF files from Office
6 were replaced by 32-bit EMF files and our documents became unusable,
especially when updating them.

As far as I am concerned, Word is uncontrollable: you have to really
jump through hoops in order to guarantee that chart 3 will always be,
to a millimeter or so, on the same page in the same place. And when you
updated in a certain sequence, then the chart boxes would disappear
entirely. It's an acknowledged bug.

So we abandoned Word entirely and do it all in Excel. We shrunk the
cell grid to tiny dimensions in order to gain a fair degree of accuracy
in placing elements on a page; we can now place charts exactly where
they should go; we use text boxes (not Word boxes: there's a
significant problem in the display attributes to a Word box that is
controlled by VBA. It defaults to stretch to fit, which means that text
is distorted whenever you add or subtract text. Known VBA problem,
solveable by using Excel and Word Objects within a VB container...), we
control the vertical and the horizontal. There is nothing wrong with
your TV... :-)

We were never able to work out a decent solution using Word and Excel:
hence we only use Excel. Give it a try, you might be surprised how well
it works.

If you'd like a sample of what we did, I'll be happy to send it to you
privately...

John
 
Hi John -

Everyone knows Word's a pain, but I've lately had some success using
Word and Excel together to layout decent looking documents. I use tables
in Word, with carefully defined sizes etc, to assure the layout. I use
charts copied as pictures in Excel (using 'on screen' and 'as picture'
options, not 'as printed' as you used in another recent post), pasted
back into Excel to allow precise resizing, then copy the resized chaart
pictures and paste into the Word tables as inline shapes.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
_______
 
Hi John -

Sure, it **can** be done. But why??? :-)

But one of my colleagues just got back from a dog & pony show of Adobe,
and i think we have glimpsed the goly hrail: in Adobe 7 Professional
there is a tool called "Designer" which works with XML. It allows us to
define per XML our final product and use JavaScript to create PDF files
(which is our goal in any case!) directly from any sort of Office
components that can be accessed via JavaScript and XML.

We just ordered an upgrade, will report how it works when we get around
to testing it in April or May (workload before then prohibits creative
solutions to any problems, just brute force like always...).

But it looks like it's gonna be a major, major productivity
improvement, since a huge amount of work (as you know) I've done in
Excel has been placing charts, tables etc in order to create documents
for mass production (for those who didn't follow this on the mailing
list, I produce 114 reports of between 27 and 59 pages using Excel
exclusively automagically from scratch to finished report in ca 14
hours of pure computer time, generating over 5000 charts and 400 tables
to create the necessary XLS sheets to generate PDFs from).

I guesstimate that if this works - and that remains a big if - then we
will return to using Excel to "merely" generate tables and charts and
leave the DTP aspects to Adobe instead. This has the potential of
reducing production time from 2 days to probably around 1 day...

John
 
Hi John -

The "why" is that for most people, the DTP aspects are much less
involved than in your case, and perhaps there is still a significant
amount of interaction required after Excel finishes before the final
report is really final.

For example, a project I'm working on has Excel crunching through a
large number of pivot tables and regular charts, and these are all
dumped into a Word template. In several places, there is room for my
client to add his commentary, which he cannot do until he sees the
charts in the preliminary Word document. He does his thing, which is
easy because it's still in Office, not DTP, then prints it to a PDF file
for distribution. He's not making several dozens of reports a month,
only a few, so your approach, which you've optimized for your
requirements, doesn't fit his.

But it's always interesting to hear how other people have had to attack
their own problems. I have another couple of clients who do lots of work
in Adobe, so I'd be interested to hear your review.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Peltier Technical Services
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
http://PeltierTech.com/
_______
 
Hi Jon -

I understand. I also work with charts and tables present in documents
in order to write my commentary, and if he's just got a few to churn
out, then your approach makes eminent sense.

I'm now looking into how to generate what I need in XML in order to
feed such a system. Guess that it means I'll be learning XML and
JavaScript on top of my other work, but I'm also looking at Ruby as an
alternative, since it seems to hash very, very nicely with XML.

But it really means a different way of looking at these sorts of
problems. We will probably outgrow Office as it currently exists, but
will end up in Office.Net for many, many of our rather complex and
arcane tasks.

The future is gonna be exciting, albeit harder and harder: but if we
can continue the kind of productivity increases that we have had over
the last ten years, then I can continue getting the kind of raises I
have been. And that's what drives this boy to do such crazy and wild
things. :-)

And I will keep y'all posted when we get to the point where we start
playing with this more seriously...

John
 
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