Office native discrepancies when exporting from Excel to PowerPoint/Word

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Written by Francois Bard | Updated

You may notice the scale changes in the resulting image when exporting from Excel to PowerPoint or Word. UpSlide uses Office's native functionality, Copy Picture, to export from Excel to PowerPoint/Word. Some discrepancies may appear between the source image and the resulting exports inherited from Office's native export modes.

Slightly inferior Chart quality

When exporting charts, we use Microsoft "Enhanced Metafile" to create the resulting charts in PowerPoint / Word. Due to the imperfect way, these objects are rendered by Office, they may look less crisp than in Excel or if you use MS native "Link Data" feature. The difference becomes less visible if you zoom on your slide: in 200%, the UpSlide chart looks as good as Microsoft's chart, demonstrating that this difference is due to how Office renders the enhanced metafile.   

Ratio and dimensions disparities

Issue

When copying or exporting from Excel, the size of the resulting image is slightly different from the original table/chart. This can be verified when the scale percentage or the height and width in centimetres differ.

Below is an example of the mentioned discrepancies using a copy/paste or UpSlide's export functionality :

mceclip1.png mceclip3.png mceclip2.png
Size in Excel Size in Powerpoint (after copy/paste)

Size in Powerpoint (after UpSlide export)

 

Note that:

  • All sizes are different.
    • The native copy is quite far from the size in Excel
    • The size of the export with UpSlide is much closer to the size in Excel than the native copy size
  • The height-to-width ratios are not the same.
    • In Excel: 13.41 / 11.85 = 1.1316
    • Native copy: 14.06 / 12.42 = 1.1320
    • UpSlide export: 13.4 / 11.83 = 1.1327

The object's ratio difference between Excel and PowerPoint is expected no matter the tool used to export it because of the difference in technologies used for rendering each of these Office applications.

UpSlide tries to correct the size difference introduced by copying and pasting an element. However, the choice was made to stay close to the original ratio so the image won't look stretched or flattened.

Workaround

Unfortunately, there is no definitive fix for this issue. They are related to the way Excel/Powerpoint/Word handles exports between applications. Still, we recommend to:

  • Keep your zoom level/DPI scaling to 100%. It won't fix the problem, but it will avoid additional issues.
  • Use the 'as shown on screen' mode if you really need to minimize differences between applications. For most users, we recommend using 'as shown when printed' to keep your work consistent when coediting a document. You can find more information about the differences between these two modes in this article.

Border display

When exporting a table from Excel to PowerPoint or Word, some borders might look thinner than in Excel. This is caused by the fact that the borders are so thin that Office displays them by rounding the width to the nearest pixel size. 

If you zoom on the exported content, the borders' width will most likely return to normal.

Table_border.png

If you see this issue by exporting a table using 'as shown on screen', the borders might look thinner because the selection doesn't include the top and left borders when using a thicker border option.

You could solve this by selecting the cells adjacent to the top and left borders, but they will appear on the export, so it won't have the correct dimensions.