A graph for all to see.

February 13, 2010 9:42 AM

How do I get an Excel-generated chart onto Facebook?

Is there a way to take a chart generated in Excel and transform it directly into an image which one could post (as a photo, I suppose) on Facebook?

Futzing about with the Print Screen function and Adobe PhotoDeluxe (no, no Photoshop, alas) have not got me anywhere. I suppose I could print the thing, scan it and post that image, but there must be a more elegant way.

posted by ricochet biscuit to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Knowing the kind of computer you have would be helpful, but you can paste your screenshot into GIMP.
posted by rhizome at 9:46 AM on February 13, 2010

Copy and paste the chart into Paint, and save as a GIF or BMP.
posted by matthewr at 9:46 AM on February 13, 2010 [1 favorite]

What usually works for me (on a PC):

1) Select the chart in Excel. Make sure you are selecting the whole chart, rather than just a portion of it.

2) Hit "Copy."

3) Open up MS Paint, hit "Paste."

4) Save as a PNG file (much smaller than BMP, but won't reduce quality - for some reason, when you save in MS Paint with GIF or JPEG, that always seems to happen).
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:47 AM on February 13, 2010

If CCoDoD's suggestion doesn't work, you can take a screenshot of the window with Alt+PrintScreen, then paste in MS Paint; you'd then crop the image to only keep the relevant part and save to PNG.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 9:51 AM on February 13, 2010

Could you use the "save as web page" option and extract the image from the folder that excel plunks all of the data into?

I imagine it'd be a gif file.
posted by davey_darling at 9:57 AM on February 13, 2010

BTW, I just tested it, and it worked a charm - there is a nice crisp png file of my chart in the folder.

You can resize you chart so it's nice and large, and it will generate a bigger PNG than you could fit on your screen for a screen capture.
posted by davey_darling at 10:09 AM on February 13, 2010

I went with the Paint option, which really hadn't even occurred to me, and it works like a charm. Thanks, all!
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:32 AM on February 13, 2010