Copy Excel charts into Illustrator?

That is true, Gary, but I find Illustrator's graph tool incredibly limited and cumbersome.

I wish it weren't!

Also, don't forget Illustrator's Graph tool. If the data in your Excel sheet is numbers (no dollar signs or % signs), you can select a range of rows and columns, copy, and paste directly into the data sheet of Illustrator's Graphing feature.

I agree. I sure didn't claim it was clean. Sometimes it's easier to just do a screen-capture and trace it in AI.

Whether you get the Excel chart into Illustrator via copy/paste or PDF, I think you may face the same problems Jenn mentions. Depending on how the chart was created in Excel, there may be too many data points - the horizontal or vertical axis may have a line of text for every point, and they all overlap - you may be able to select them all and change the point size to something small enough to distinguish; or rotate each instance of type 90 degrees (move them to a new layer and ungroup first, then Object > Transform Each).

Sometimes each bar has a fill and a stroke; when brought into Illustrator they are separate objects. I generally select one of the stroke objects and Select > Same Fill and Stroke, and delete them, leaving only the filled bars.

I find it helpful to move all the useful data - for example, all the bars of one color, bars of another color, horizontal lines, x-axis, y-axis, and so on - onto separate layers. Much easier to work with when you can selectively lock, hide, and transform.

Hey, saving to PDF works like a charm!

Fantastic!

Thank you so much.

Gerd

I guess there are some advantages to being the last to upgrade. :)

Have you tried printing the chart to PDF? I'm guessing it would be vector and could be opened in AI. Of course, that would be too easy.

Hi Ray

Thanks so much for the trouble taken.

I see in another thread the problem seems to be with Excel 2008!

Topic: Excel 2008 > Illustrator CS3 possible?

Wonder if there is any "cure", or if I have to reinstall Excel 2004?

FWIW This movie has text caption.
http://www.vimeo.com/2838964

Here's a little movie that demonstrates the steps.
http://www.vimeo.com/2838751

Are you seeing the "Copy Picture" option in the Edit menu (by "Shift-clicking" the Edit menu)? Any "Copy Picture" options will work. Then go to Illustrator and paste into a document. You get a vector chart. <br /> <br />OSX 10.4.11, AICS3, Excel 2004. <br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=17OzH2CssKaGhkN9RteCDuw4e12mE2" /></a> <img alt="Picture hosted by Pixentral" src="http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/17OzH2CssKaGhkN9RteCDuw4e12mE2_thumb.png" border="0" />