Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Excel Plots - High DPI

Ever felt dissatisfied about the quality of the plots that excel gives.. ?? I was always.

That is the reason why I use Gnuplot most of the times. But for the not so complex plotting I do in office, if I want to have a presentation worthy diagrams or plots, Gnuplot is two much over kill. Anyways.. I found an alternative today and thought it might be useful for you guys!!

Pre-requisites.. ;)
  • Microsoft excel of some version.
  • Adobe professional or at least adobe pdf printer that supports your excel Installation.
The procedure:
  • format your plot in excel
  • click on some location of your plot
  • file - print - Adobe pdf.
  • and print it (you can set your required dpi settings in the advanced options of the print dialog)
you have your plot as pdf file. What is more important is, it will be a vector graphic. Use your good old tricks like zooming in and copying in the graphic from a pdf file and you will have very clean plot of yours ready for presentation. If you want to do the same zooming in excel you will mess up with the fonts... :D

Here is the proof.


This one is taken from pdf.

This one is directly copied and pasted from excel.

ps: Click on the plots. You can clearly make out the smoothness difference.

2 comments:

aarthi said...

Nice Idea.. To just add: Office 2007 solves many of such asthetic issues in MS office in general..

Anonymous said...

I never know!! 2007 isn't deployed yet in my office. Hope they will do it soon.