Save Your Excel Chart as an Image

Excel is one of the best programs a person can use to turn hard data into an attractive and easily understood chart. An Excel chart can make a striking visual for a presentation or report. Here are three different ways to save an Excel chart as an image file, such as .bmp, .jpg, and .png, to be used in a variety of ways.

1. Copy to a graphics program. You can directly copy Excel visuals to graphics programs such as Microsoft Paint, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Fireworks. This is often the easiest way of saving a chart as a visual. Copy and paste the entire chart by right-clicking on the border and selecting Copy. Note: Make sure you are clicking on the border and not in the chart or graph, or you will only copy one small element of the visual.

Then, simply open your graphics program and paste the chart either by right-clicking and selecting Paste or hitting Ctrl+V.

2. Export to another Office program. Excel images can be exported to any Microsoft Office program that supports graphics. Think PowerPoint and Word. Simply copy the chart or graph and paste it in the same manner as described in the first option. If you wish to keep Excel functions in the visual element, you can choose to remain linked to the chart data. Just paste by right-clicking and choose Keep Source Formatting & Link Data.

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Remember: The one potential advantage, or drawback, to this approach is that the chart in Word or PowerPoint retains its link to the Excel document and will change when the data changes.

3. Save the chart as an image in Excel. This is the best option if you need to save images of all of the charts in an Excel document. This would take a long time using the instructions in the above two options, but you can actually do them all at once. Simply click on File and then Save As. You will be offered a range of file types; select Web Page. Check to be sure that you have Entire Workbook selected. From here, select the folder that you will be saving to and hit Save.

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These instructions should make it easy to save excel chart as image. Now you can share your Excel data in a more informative and appealing format with almost no additional effort!