In this article you will discover how to preserve your Excel chart as an image (.png, .jpg, .bmp etc.) or transfer it to another file such as a Word document or PowerPoint presentation.

Microsoft Excel stands as one of the most potent tools for data analysis, offering numerous features and specialized options to visualize your data. One of these options is charts (or graphs), which can be created in Excel by simply selecting your data and clicking on the appropriate chart icon.

However, like many strong tools, Excel charts have their limitations. A drawback of Excel charts is the absence of an option to save them as images or to transfer them to another file. It would be convenient if we could just right-click on a graph and see options like "Save as image" or "Transfer to". Since Microsoft hasn't provided such features, we'll devise our own solutions.

In this article, I will demonstrate four methods to save an Excel chart as an image, allowing you to embed it into other Office applications like Word and PowerPoint, or use it to design attractive infographics:

A colleague once shared with me how they typically copy their Excel charts to Paint. They create a chart, press PrintScreen, open Paint, and paste the image of the full screen. Afterward, they crop the unnecessary screen parts and save the remainder as a file. If you follow this method, stop doing so and never use this simplistic approach again! There is a faster and smarter way :-)

As an example, I generated a nice 3-D Pie graph in my Excel 2010 that visually represents the demographics of our website's visitors, and now I wish to export this Excel chart as an image. Here's what we do:

1. Right-click somewhere on the chart border and click Copy. Avoid placing the cursor inside the chart; this might select individual elements instead of the whole graph, and you won't see the Copy command.
2. Open Paint and paste the chart by clicking the Paste icon on the Home tab or pressing Ctrl V:
3. Now all that remains is to save your chart as an image file. Click the "Save as" button and choose from available formats (.png, .jpg, .bmp and .gif). For more options, click the "Other formats" button at the end of the list.

It’s that straightforward! In a similar manner, you can save your Excel chart in any other graphics painting program.

Transfer an Excel chart to Word and PowerPoint

If you need to transfer an Excel chart to another Office application like Word, PowerPoint, or even Outlook, the best approach is to paste it directly from the clipboard:

1. Copy your chart as described in step 1 above.
2. Click in your Word document or PowerPoint presentation where you want to paste the chart and press Ctrl V. Alternatively, you can right-click anywhere in the file and you will see a variety of additional Paste Options to choose from:

The primary advantage of this method is that it enables you to transfer a fully-functional Excel chart to another file, rather than just an image. The graph will maintain its connection with the original Excel worksheet and refresh automatically whenever your Excel data are updated. In this way, you won’t need to recopy the chart with each data change.

Save a chart to Word and PowerPoint as image

In Office 2007, 2010, and 2013 applications, you can also copy an Excel chart as an image. In this case, it will behave as a standard picture and won’t update. For instance, let’s transfer our Excel chart to a Word 2010 document.

1. Copy the chart from your Excel workbook, switch to your Word document, place the cursor where you want to insert the graph, and then click on the tiny black arrow at the bottom of the Paste button on the Home tab:
2. You will see the "Paste Special..." button as shown in the screenshot above. Clicking it will open the Paste Special dialog and you will see a number of available image formats including Bitmap, GIF, PNG, and JPEG.
3. Choose one of the formats and click OK.

Perhaps the Paste Special option is available in earlier Office versions as well, but I haven’t used them for quite a while, which is why I cannot confirm this with certainty.

Save all charts in an Excel workbook as images

The methods we have discussed so far work well if you have one or a few charts. But what if you need to copy all charts in the entire Excel workbook? It would take quite a bit of time to copy / paste them individually. Good news is that you don’t have to do that! Here’s how you can save all charts in a workbook at once:

1. When all of your charts are ready, switch to the File tab and click the Save As button.
2. The Save As dialog will open and you choose Web Page (*.htm;*html) under "Save as type". Also, ensure the "Entire Workbook" radio button next to Save is selected, as shown in the screenshot:
3. Choose the destination folder where you want to save your files and click the Save button.

The .png images of all charts will be copied to that folder along with html files. The next screenshot shows the content of the folder where I saved my workbook. The book contains 3 worksheets with a graph in each, and as you can see, all three .png images are present!

As you know, PNG is one of the best image-compression formats without any loss of picture quality. If you prefer some other formats for your pictures, you can easily convert them to .jpg, .gif, .bmp etc.

Save a chart as image using a VBA macro

If you need to export your Excel charts as pictures regularly, you can automate this task using a VBA macro. The good news is that several such macros already exist, so there’s no need to start from scratch :)

For instance, you can use the reliable solution published by Jon Peltier on his blog. The macro is as simple as this: ActiveChart.Export "D:\My Charts\SpecialChart.png"

This line of code allows you to export the selected chart as a .png image to the specified folder. Even if you’ve never written a single macro before, you can create your first one right now in 4 easy steps.

Before you proceed with the macro, create a folder where you want to export the chart. In our case, it is My Charts folder on disk D. All preparations are complete, let’s dive into the macro.

1. In your Excel workbook, switch to the Developer tab and click on the Macros icon in the Code group.

   Note. If this is the first time you’re creating a macro, most likely the Developer tab won’t be visible in your workbook. In this case, switch to the File tab, click Options > Customize Ribbon. In the right-hand part of the window, in the Main Tabs list, select Developer, and then click OK.

2. Give your macro a name, for example SaveSelectedChartAsImage and choose to enable it in your current workbook only:

3. Click the Create button and you will have the Visual Basic Editor open with the outlines of a new macro already written for you. Copy the following macro in the second line: `ActiveChart.Export

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