Excel to Corel to Word - quality issues

Hi,

I've got a load of 3D Excel graphs that I need to add to my word document. They need to be edited and tweaked in Corel first. That's fine - I copy from Excel (2003) and paste special into Corel (9) as metafiles. I then do my edititing and everything's great. I then try exporting them and the quality degrades significantly.

If I export as jpegs etc, I get lots of lines on the corners running over, or the square sides of the bars become trapezoid. If I print directly from Corel, the image is great, but the exported file is rubbish. It's not a word thing, as if I open the exported file independantly, the quality is poor as well.

If I export as .eps files the text is unreadable on screen, although these images actually print OK (still not great though). The problem is I have to keep sending my word documents to be checked and edited by other people, and it's a bit of a waste having to print off every page with a graph on it just so as to read it!

I have to say I am a complete novice when it comes to CorelDraw, and I'm really hoping it's something elementary that I'm missing.. However, when searching for help, while tearing my hair out, most pages imply it's quite simple, and that everything should be fine, esp if you use vector files such as .eps...

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I'm loosing my tenuous grip on reality with this. Totally vexing.

Cheers,

Chris

You should save your graphic as a .wmf, this will preserve the vector crispness both in print and on screen plus you can import .wmf to a Word document.

If you must save for some reason to a .jpg and your purpose is to print, you need to select 300 dpi and move the quality sliders all the way to the left which gives no compression, no smoothing. At most you should probably only have these sliders adjusted for file size saving no more thatn 1/3 from the left for a clear view. The minimum dpi is 150 for print, but 300 dpi is best for print. Note: 72 or 96 dpi is the screen resolution but doesn't print very well.

Also note you want to have Anti-Aliasing turned on, Maintain Aspect Ratio and Apply ICC Profile.

The problem of getting images from a graphics application like CorelDRAW into a Microsoft Office application is a common one. However given the awful WMF/EMF format limitations this is how I get graphics from Draw into Word

Select the elements to be copied
Zoom the view out as far as you can go
Scale up the drawing to fill the view
Then cut and paste special into Word.

Why a vector format should suffer from resolution loss is beyond me, but EMF/WMF do and the above technique helped out an Adobe Illustrator user. So I always maintain it is a limitation of the EMF/WMF file format and dodgy vector graphics handling by MS Office applications.

One of the reasons I might give Vista a look see, a bit earlier than normal is purely down the fact that Microsoft may finally have got to grips with Vector handling, partly because the whole User Interface is based on them.

HTH

Peter

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your quick responses.

I'm afraid the .wmf's were no good either - they were better, but the corners of the 3D graph blocks were still a little odd, and some of the square shapes became very trapezoid.

I've just had to stick with the .eps files, and accept that they look crap/unviewable on screen.

I'm really not sure though that it is neccessarily a MS issue (I don't often think that way!) because the exported jpegs etc look pretty ropey no matter what I open them in.

It's just so vexing that you can see a nice image in Corel, and print it straight from Corel and it still looks great, but the moment you try and move it to another application it looks rubbish. Either poor printing, but looks OK on screen, or really ropey on screen, but prints OK.

Makes me reach for my fags every time I try and do anything with graphics! (do you reckone there's a law suit in there somewhere??)

Cheers anyway guys.

Why not bring in the rest of your document from Word to DRAW and then nothing will look crappy. Besides, smoking isn't healthy. These days, have to save money in order to fill the tank, right?

XD

Yeah, tell me about it - I'm in the UK, now our petrol prices *are* high(!)

I like your idea about bringing everything into Corel, but I don't think my boss would be too happy about navigating around a 100-odd page Thesis in Corel.. Not even sure he's got the programme anyway.

Cheers anyway though,

With Word, you can embed a document and you don't have to have the program for it to display properly. Although the best method would be a .pdf.

An embedded document using the OLE system might work.

Hi Sally,

My aim is to distill it to PDF when it's done, but I'm bouncing it between me and my supervisor at the moment to do all the little bits of editing etc. It's too time-consuming to distill it each time.

Cheers,

You should view the flash movies on the Corel WordPerfect Suite. It is compatible with office but can do somethings you are looking to do seemlessly. And one of them is graphing. The Corel version of Excel, QuattroPro, can render 3-D graphs which update automatically and render beautifully both on screen and in print and are shared equally well between the word processor, WordPerfect and itself. Additionally the information sharing between all the Corel programs is better, less crashes due to interpretting problems and consequently it works faster with DRAW.

Not only that, but it comes with the ability to make its own .pdf so you don't have to use Distiller.

You may not have time right now, but I recommend you give it a trial or at least take time and watch the Flash movies on the suite of office programs. My son's going to be needing a laptop for school and we don't own enough licenses to put Microsoft Office on his laptop too, cheaper for me to get Corel WordPerfect Office.