Apologies to anyone who may read this blog, I haven't updated it for absolutely ages!
During my hiatus, I have not only been to Glastonbury and had a marvellous time, but I have also been busy writing up my MSc dissertation (honest).
Now as most people probably do, I am using MS Word (for OS X) to write up my findings and a lot of the data that I have collected has been input into MS Excel. From that data I managed to create some very pretty charts, of the bar and pie variety. Whey hey!
I have 2 problems using MS Excel. One is that I find the Help rather unhelpful. The other issue is that I find interaction between 2 Office products to be less than intuitive at times. I spent ages saving my charts and cutting and pasting them into my Word doc but this did not work as the images were all wrong and you couldn't read the data.
I then thought 'ah ha, you have to insert an Object! ' Lo and behold there was indeed an option to insert an Excel Chart. Did this work then? Well no. I concede that I may have done this all wrong but the only thing I managed to do was create an Excel icon that linked to the entire Excel file. It did not insert the individual chart that I needed.
It turns out that what you need to do (having created and saved your chart in Excel) is to Copy it and then use Paste Special in Word. This then gives you a load of useful options such as linking to the originating chart so that when data is updated in Excel, it automatically updates in Word too. The chart will then be pasted where you need it and it renders much more clearly doing it this way.
So please, if you are trying to insert a chart or a table of data into Word from Excel, use Paste Special!
I found this rather marvellous advice by searching on Google and following some search results to a couple of training tips from academic institutions on how to do this.
Thursday 7 August 2008
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