post excel chart onto a forum

bindiboo

Hi I am doing a spreadsheet chart on excel and want to post the chart on a forum. I can only attach pics or link to a image on the web. can anyone tell me how to go about this

f1charlie

Right click on the chart and copy.

Open paint (or your favourite image editor) and paste it in.

Save as a jpeg.

Lokolo

Or use google spreadsheets and paste the url to the document

john_s_2

Call me Mr Picky but a GIF would be preferable to a JPG for an Excel chart (or any type of graphic). It should provide a sharper picture due to the different ways those formats save images.

But it probably makes little difference for a one-off in a forum.

f1charlie

I just tried it and GIF was worse quality than JPG. Perhaps you meant BMP?
However that gives a file size of over 10 times greater than JPG.

Domokun

Save it as a PNG. This retains the same quality as a BMP, doesn't artifact like a JPG and has more colours than a GIF.

If you're more worried about filesize than quality, JPG should work fine. PNG is supported by all image hosting services (if it isn't by yours, get another. Photobucket is a great website).

john_s_2

f1charlie wrote: »

I just tried it and GIF was worse quality than JPG. Perhaps you meant BMP?

I have to say, I'm surprised. I use exactly this method for producing the Excel Chart on this page:

http://www.bfcsa.co.uk/0708/stats/atten.htm

I tested this last night and my resulting GIF was (from memory) around 19KB while the resulting JPG (with 15% compression - using PSP v5 for both images) was 46KB. When I zoomed into the JPG I soon found the noise/dithering that I was expecting, around the borders of the shapes. The GIF remained sharp, as I expected.

It is true that a GIF can only store 256 colours, but graphics tend to have far fewer colours than this, so this shouldn't be an issue. So long as the original image has fewer than 256 colours, a GIF isn't 'lossy' - unlike a JPG. A simple Excel Chart will have fewer than 16 colours.

Edit: I just tried the same using Paint and sure enough it doesn't produce very nice GIFs. So if the OP only has access to Paint then a JPG seems the way to go.

I shouldn't have said anything! ;-)