I'd like to import charts from MS Excel 2016 into Inkscape. I can copy the chart in Excel and paste them into Adobe Illustrator just fine (all the components including text can be edited) but if I paste them into Inkscape they arrive as bitmap images. Can I get them into Inkscape but still have them editable and scaleable?

well, a quick and dirty solution would be: export your table as PDF and import it into Inkscape.
You probably need to ungroup several times until you end up with lines, paths and text which can be edited...

edit: I quickly tried with Win7/Excel2013 and Inkscape 0.92, well, copy & paste seem to work. I directly get a table. Although, the table via PDF import looks better. In the copy&paste version numbers are somewhat shifted...

I've seen a lot of message where people are having trouble importing from Excel or similar programs.

If Inkscape can't open a file, it imports it as a raster image. I don't know what file format you would be importing, but here's a list of what Inkscape can open natively: https://inkscape.org/en/learn/faq/#what ... portexport

theozh wrote:edit: I quickly tried with Win7/Excel2013 and Inkscape 0.92, well, copy & paste seem to work. I directly get a table. Although, the table via PDF import looks better. In the copy&paste version numbers are somewhat shifted...

Unfortunately, I'm trying to copy charts (bar graphs with error bars) and charts don't seem to import the same way as tabulated data.

Exporting charts from Excel as PDFs first before importing into Inkscape works well but it takes longer to do.

...just double checked...
Well, actually on imported charts via PDF you cannot edit axes text properly. Recently, I just learned in this forum that you have to remove the "Manual Kerns" (Menu ¦ Text ¦ Remove Manual Kerns). But then with a Excel test table the axes text got messed up. Too bad
So, it probably depends what exactly you want to edit in the Excel table with Inkscape.
(Well, of course you could use gnuplot for plotting your data which has a direct output for SVG.)

I found in LibreOffice, I can right click and save charts as SVG, maybe in excel too? Then just import.
(copy paste works fine too)

You might even consider using LibreOffice, unless other parts of your workflow require excel.

theozh wrote:...just double checked...
Well, actually on imported charts via PDF you cannot edit axes text properly. Recently, I just learned in this forum that you have to remove the "Manual Kerns" (Menu ¦ Text ¦ Remove Manual Kerns). But then with a Excel test table the axes text got messed up. Too bad
So, it probably depends what exactly you want to edit in the Excel table with Inkscape.
(Well, of course you could use gnuplot for plotting your data which has a direct output for SVG.)

tylerdurden wrote:I found in LibreOffice, I can right click and save charts as SVG, maybe in excel too? Then just import.
(copy paste works fine too)

You might even consider using LibreOffice, unless other parts of your workflow require excel.

GNUplot looks pretty powerful but also really complicated and time consuming to learn and use and format data in a way that it will accept so I'll try opening my files in LibreOffice to see if that bypasses this problem.