When exporting from Excel to PowerPoint or Word, you may notice the scale changes in the resulting image. 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.

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 is different.

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

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 handle 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 the vast majority of our 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 they were in Excel. This is caused by the fact that the borders are so thin that Office displays them by rounding up the width to the nearest pixel size. 

If you zoom on the exported content, the width of the borders will most likely go back to normal.

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 also selecting the cells adjacent to the top and left borders, but they will appear on the export so it won't have the right dimensions.