copy and paste large spreadsheets

Hi rick,

If you simply paste a range of cells into PowerPoint (not Paste Special), it will paste as an Excel workbook object. When you do this, even though only a limited number of rows and columns are visible at an instant, you can scroll in the worksheet--or even tab to other worksheets--to display other parts of the workbook, from within PowerPoint. To do this, though, you must be in edit mode (not slide show) and you must double-click on the Excel object to open it in Excel. This may not be the functionality that you want. However, other methods, such as enhanced metafile ("Picture") are limited (although the limit is very large) in the number of rows and columns that can be displayed, and this is entirely fitting.

PowerPoint is a presentation tool, and displaying more than about 15 rows of a spreadsheet in a presentation is never appropriate because in a live presentation it would be unreadable except perhaps by people with 20-20 vision in the first row. There is also the issue of presentation "data overload," i.e., trying to get to much onto one chart for anyone to read in a reasonable amount of time. Displaying more than 72 rows would not even be readable in hardcopy form, so I suspect you are attempting to use PowerPoint for something other than presentations, in which case some other application would likely be more suitable.

Damon

Thanks, Damon. The enhanced metafile pastes thte same number of rows and columns as picture.

Actually, I don't need anyone to read the contents of the cells. The cells are colour-coded by value and it is the pattern of colours I want the viewer to see. I have 4 months of daily data (~120 rows) X about 30 locations (columns) and the cells contain an accumulated crop disease value at each station. At critical thresholds, the cells are given a colour. I have multiple treatments and the variation in the progression of disease under the various treatments becomes very obvious when diplayed this way. Hence my need to make a PowerPoint "picture" that I can show during talks.

So far, I have not been able to find a way to do this.

Hi again Rick,

Okay, that makes sense. In that case I would suggest that you simply divide the spreadsheet into multiple "patches", each patch being small enought to paste into PowerPoint as a Picture (enhanced metafile). Then paste the patches together in PowerPoint, and when you get them all arranged and fitting together properly, group them into one object so that the patches are locked in this relationship.

Thanx again Damon. That's what I have usually done in the past. I was hoping there might be a more elegant solution.
rg