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Your existing Charts and Graphics

Converting your existing presentations to incorporate the new chart formatting is extremely easy.

These steps are identical regardless of the actual format and will work for all types of formatting.

1) Open your existing presentation.

2) Create a new presentation title slide using the new Template Wizard toolbar.

3) Copy all the slides (except the title slide) into the new presentation.

4) Redefine all your charts and graphics to the correct position.

Step 1 - Open your existing presentation

For this example we have used PowerPoint's default template.

Step 2 - Create a new presentation

The first button on the Template Wizard toolbar lets you create a new presentation.

The new presentation dialog box is displayed everytime you create a new presentation.

Enter the title, subtitle and date for the presentation you want to convert.

It is possible to modify your existing presentations so they are compatible with the new template.

Any old presentation must have all their slides copied across and pasted into a new presentation.

Step 3 - Copy all the slides across

Use the Window drop-down menu to select your existing presentation.

Select (View > Slide Sorter) and copy all the slides from your existing presentation.

Once the presentation has been copied across all the charts will be adjusted to the new colour scheme automatically.

Step 4 - Redefine your charts and graphics

Existing charts will have to be re-defined as new charts.

For more information about redefining existing textboxes please refer the Converting Presentations page.

This is very simple to do although working with Microsoft Graph in PowerPoint can sometimes lead to some unpredicatable formatting and sizing.

There are two ways you can redefine your charts to the new format.

1) Select the chart object and reformat it.

2) Create a new chart in PowerPoint and copy across the DataSheet.

3) Create a new chart in Excel and copy it across as a picture.

1) Reformat Existing Chart

2) Create a new Chart in PowerPoint

To ensure that the chart is formatted correctly it is safer to create a new chart and then copy the data values across.

Insert a new slide after the slide that contains the chart.

Add a chart placeholder in the corresponding position. Double click the chart placeholder to insert a chart.

Copy all the numbers from the original datasheet to the new datasheet.

You can easily display the data sheet if it is not displayed by selecting (View > DataSheet).

You can change the chart type after the new data has been pasted in.

3) Create a new Chart in Excel

You can alternatively create the chart in Excel and paste it is as a picture.

Converting your PowerPoint charts to Excel charts is very simple and just involves copying the data from the data sheet to a worksheet.

Select the chart you want to convert and double click it to display the Data Sheet.

Select the cells in the datasheet and copy and paste this data into an Excel worksheet.

This chart can then be easily created, resized, formatted and then copied using the Chart Doctor toolbar into PowerPoint.

The chart can then easily be repositioned and the placeholder can be replaced.

Things to Remember

Combination charts might be especially difficult to format correctly.

All your existing charts can be reformatted although the font size can often get distorted. When this happens you should create the chart in Excel and copy it across to PowerPoint as a picture.