Forum Discussion
Printing excel chart in high quality
Hello,
I'm new here and I need help. I have a very important meeting at my company on Tuesday which can possibly give me the promotion that I have been waiting for.
The thing is our CEO is going to convince stakeholders of the company about something and for that he has chosen me to accompany him and do a part of the conversation. So, I cannot make any mistakes.
We will be giving a company report to each stakeholder, so that they can follow along when we are talking in the meeting. I am creating that report right now and I need to add some charts to it but when I am color printing the charts the prints are not coming out as clear as I want them to be.
So my question is how I can print the charts in Excel at the highest quality possible?
So far, I have tried copy pasting the chart from excel to paint and saving it and printing it. I even tried creating chart on a website that I found via google but the print quality of the chart image I downloaded from there came out very poor.
Please help.
6 Replies
- I understand you don't want to leave any stone unturned so I guess you wouldn't mind learning a bit about how printing works.
First thing you need to understand is, to get crisp and clear print, you need a high resolution file.
I think by trying all the methods you are failing particularly at this and this only—saving the chart at enough resolution to print it at high quality on your paper.
So first you need to determine the minimum resolution your image file should be to print it at high quality, which depends on the size of your paper.
The most common paper that we all use in our offices is the letter. I am considering you are also using the same paper. If not, you need to find the size of the paper you are using in inch.
So the size of the letter paper is 8.5in x 11in. Now you can use any calculator that gives you pixel size from inch for printing at 300 DPI (setting DPI at 300 is important for high quality) - https://cssunitconverter.com/inches-to-pixels/
So to print on 8.5in x 11in paper, you need your image file to be of at least 2550 x 3300 pixels. Higher resolution than this is good but lower resolution than this mean compromised print quality.
Once you have the image file of this size you need to ensure that your printer settings are configured in right way. Make sure to print at the highest DPI (Dots Per Inch) settings your printer supports.
So this is how you can get the highest quality print that you are looking for.- Thanks. This was helpful. I am using A4 size paper 150GSM silk coated. I got paper size in inch from internet as you said, which is 8.27 diagonally x 11.69 vertically so I put that in converter and got 2481 x 3507 resolution.
I tried a lot but couldn't get that resolution image from excel so at last I uploaded my sheet to canva and created the graph there of the required size.
Tomorrow at the office I will print the reports.- Happy to help and good luck for your meeting 👍
- Steps:
1. Go to File Export Create PDF/XPS.
2. In the **Options** dialog, select **High quality printing**.
3. Save the PDF and print it directly. PDFs maintain vector quality, which is ideal for clear, high-resolution printing.
2. Copy as a Picture
Steps:
1. Select the chart in Excel.
2. Right-click on it and choose Copy.
3. Go to Home > Paste > As Picture > Paste Picture or Copy as Picture.
4. Save this image in a high-resolution format like PNG by pasting it into software like PowerPoint, then right-clicking to Save as Picture .
3. Print Settings in Excel
-Steps:
1. Go to Page Layout > Print Quality and select the highest DPI (dots per inch) setting available (e.g., 600 DPI or higher if available).
2. Check Scale to Fit to ensure your chart uses as much page space as possible, preventing resolution loss from scaling.
4. Use PowerPoint for Enhanced Export Options
Steps:
Copy the chart and paste it into PowerPoint.
In PowerPoint, right-click the chart and Save as Picture. Choose a high-resolution format like PNG or PDF for better quality.
Open the saved image in any PDF editor and print from there. - I like to stretch the chart out in the excel to full screen and then take screenshot and then crop. This way I have gotten reasonably large resolution chart image to take out prints.
- Tried this and the print quality seems to have improved a little bit but they are still not crystal clear especially the text which somehow does not look as sharp as say if I printed a text document.
