I try to avoid Microsoft products whenever possible, but for presentations PowerPoint is still the best solution for me. Today I prepared a talk for a meeting this week and I tried to add a graph, which I produced in Excel. Thus after tuning the plot inside the spreadsheet I did a classical “copy-paste” action, hoping that the graph appears on the slide as it was inside Excel. But, no way. Not only that most of the formatting (labels and layout) got lost, also lines changed their colour. Why can this happen? I thought that MS apps are “talking” with each other using these objects, which can be embedded in another application. So I tried to re-format the plot for about five minutes and then gave up and produced the figure with gnuplot and imported a JPG in PowerPoint. Now the slide looks professional (its always hard to produce scientific plots with Excel) and since a graphic files is embedded in the PPT file, I don’t have to worry about if the graph changes when I copy the presentation to another PC. Am I just not talented with Microsoft’s way to share information across their products or are they trying to frustrate costumers by offering useless features for their software?

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