Creating a JPG File from a Chart

Madeleine has a worksheet that includes a number of charts. She needs to create a JPG file that contains one of those charts. She is looking for the best way to create a high-quality JPG from the chart.

There are actually a good number of ways you can perform this task. Before mentioning them, though, it should be mentioned that if you want "high quality," you may not want to use JPG. The reason is simple—JPG is considered a "lossy" file format. This means that when you save as JPG, some of your quality may be lost, depending on how compressed you choose to make the image file. Instead, seek to save your images in a "lossless" format, such as PNG or TIF. If you absolutely need to have the JPG format, you could always convert the PNG or TIF file to JPG, which means you then still have the higher-quality image file available for later use.

To save your chart in a graphics format (be it JPG or one of the others), one approach is to pass the image through either Word or PowerPoint. Follow these general steps:

1. In Excel, click once on the chart you want to save as a JPG file.
2. Press Ctrl+C. This copies the image to the Clipboard.
3. Switch to Word or PowerPoint.
4. Click the down-arrow next to the Paste tool on the Home tab of the ribbon.
5. Choose Paste Special from the options presented. You'll see the Paste Special dialog box. (The dialog box is essentially the same in both Word and PowerPoint.)
6. From the pasting options available, choose JPEG Picture (or an equivalent format).
7. Click OK. This pastes the image into either the Word document or the PowerPoint slide.
8. Right-click the picture you just pasted and choose Save As Picture from the options presented.
9. Use the controls in the resulting dialog box to specify a location and fileame for the picture.
10. Click Save to actually save the image.

You can also use the Snipping tool (an accessory available in Windows) to capture just about anything that appears on your screen. The advantage of this approach is that you are actually capturing the chart at the full resolution of what you see on your screen. You can find out more about the Snipping tool on this page:

https://windows.tips.net/T012558

To capture a larger version of your chart with the Snipping tool, you can adjust the zoom setting in Excel before actually doing the capture.

Another approach is to create a PDF of your chart. Assuming you have Adobe Acrobat on your system (you'll want to check; not everyone does), you can then load the PDF file and choose to export it as a JPG file. This produces an image that is just as high a quality as what you see when you look at the PDF file.

Of course, you could use other third-party graphics programs to get your chart into a graphics format. The steps are similar to those detailed earlier:

1. Start a graphics program such as Paint, Irfanview, PhotoShop, or something similar.
2. Switch back to Excel and display your chart as you normally would.
3. Right-click the chart and choose Copy from the resulting Context menu. This copies the chart to the Clipboard.
4. Switch to the graphics program.
5. Press Ctrl+V to paste the chart into the graphics program.
6. Save the image in your desired (JPG) format.

If you need to save your charts as graphics quite a bit, you might want to consider using a macro to do the exporting directly. Here's how you do it:

Sub SaveChartAsJPG()
    Dim sFileName As String

    sFileName = ThisWorkbook.Path & "\" & ActiveChart.Name & ".jpg"
    ActiveChart.Export Filename:=sFileName, FilterName:="JPG"
End Sub

This macro results in the currently selected chart being saved in the same folder in which the workbook is saved. If you decide you would rather save your chart in PNG format, then all you need to do is change "jpg" to "png" and "JPG" to "PNG".

For additional ideas about how to save your charts in a graphics format, you may be interested in this page:

https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2013/08/27/save-excel-chart-as-image/

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (1775) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016.