Hello,
I've noticed that when copying and pasting something (any set of objects or graphs, grouped or not) from powerpoint or excel 2010, that they are pasted into inkscape (0.48.1) as an image and not as a set of grouped objects. This does not appear to be the case in Office 2003. Does anyone know how to do this, or is this a bug? I did not notice any sort of "copy as" or "paste as" options in powerpoint or inkscape.
Thanks.

warmonked wrote:Hello,
I've noticed that when copying and pasting something (any set of objects or graphs, grouped or not) from powerpoint or excel 2010, that they are pasted into inkscape (0.48.1) as an image and not as a set of grouped objects. This does not appear to be the case in Office 2003. Does anyone know how to do this, or is this a bug? I did not notice any sort of "copy as" or "paste as" options in powerpoint or inkscape.
Thanks.

Greetings warmonked;

And welcome to the Inkscape forum.

I'm going over your post here... I'm going to have a little difficulty answering because I don't have or use Microsoft Office. The closest I have is OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org. While it is not identical to MS Office, it's going to have to do in terms of copying/pasting from one application to another.

I've opened Presentation (a presentation program, similar to PowerPoint) and I've generated a phoney chart within it.

I'm running Inkscape 0.48.1 release 2. I'm going to copy said graph and paste it into Inkscape.

*copies*

Well. The bogus graph generated in Presentation copied perfectly into Inkscape. Text is text and lines are vectors, just as I would expect from two OpenSource software packages.

From this simple test and simple observation it would seem that the real issue here is Microsoft Office. Though it is not my desire to start a flame war, perhaps you could install OpenOffice, export your MS Office files to OpenOffice format, load the file into the correct opensource software and copy/paste.

Welcome to the forum, warmonked!

I haven't previously tried to answer your message, because I have neither Poweroint or Excel, nor anything similar. I'm glad that BobSongs has ventured to try to test and offer suggestions

So I'm wondering BobSongs, it seems that warmonked is concerned because when he/she pastes from those programs, that they are pasted into Inkscape as images, rather than as groups (which apparently is what he/she expected, though I'm really completely unfamiliar). Besides your results of

Text is text and lines are vectors....

did you test or notice anything regarding groups?

Or has my unfamiliarity left me lacking in understanding the issue?

The pasted graph/chart pasted accurately, albeit kinda large. And it pasted as a unified group.

I selected the object and clicked the ungroup button (Ctrl + Shift + G). That broke the object up into its various parts: text was editable, lines were paths that could be moved around.

The image was embedded as a set of vectors, not as a non-break-up-able bitmap. Since the complaint is that it is an "and not as a set of grouped objects", I imagine that MS Office lets a user copy out parts of a document, but does so only as a bitmap.

My guess is that the OpenOffice team is more aware of the Inkscape team's work than Microsoft does or cares to know.

Hi,

First of all, I'd like to apologize for my approximative English.

I unearth an old topic to give a non fully satisfying solution and knew questions.

I had the same trouble as you warmonked. I have partially solved the problem using Powerpoint. You copy the graph and past it in a Powerpoint document. Then, you save the graph as an image in the optimized microsoft metafile extension. This image can be imported in Inkscape as vectors but some parts are still grouped as the bars of the scale, the tip of the error bars, if you had points on your graph, they disappear and axe title are moved. An other annoying thing is that all the objects are considered as bordered objects and I can't change them in path (or way, I don't know the term used in the English version of Inkscape). It makes the task more complicated. Do anyone can give me a way to solve this problem?

I have contacted the technical support of Microsoft about the way to have a fully vector compatible copy of the graphs, always the same answer "it's not our fault and try to find a way by yourself"...

I hope that the little tricky solution will help some. Thanks for reading me besides my faults.

Save powerpoint as a PDF and then import that PDF in inkscape.

Use Libreoffice Draw as a proxy:
- Copy in Powerpoint
- Paste as GDI in Libreoffice Draw
- Copy in Libreoffice Draw
- Paste in Inkscape

As a bonus, text fields are editable in Inkscape.