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How to Save Excel Chart as High Resolution Image

Cody Schneider•

Nothing deflates a sharp-looking presentation or report faster than a blurry, pixelated chart. You created a brilliant visualization in Excel, but the moment you copy and paste it into PowerPoint, a Word document, or your blog, it becomes a messy artifact from the early days of the internet. This article will show you several reliable methods to export your Excel charts as clean, professional, high-resolution images every single time.

Why Does My Excel Chart Look So Bad?

The core problem is simple: when you use a standard copy-paste (CTRL+C, CTRL+V), you're often just grabbing a low-resolution screenshot of the chart, sized for your monitor. This screen-level quality gets stretched and distorted when you put it into a high-resolution document or try to resize it, leading to the fuzzy text and jagged lines you hate. Excel prioritizes what you see on screen, not what it will look like when printed or published.

To fix this, you need to use a method that exports the chart based on its underlying data and formatting rules, not just the pixels currently on your display. Don't worry, there are several ways to do this, ranging from a quick fix to an advanced technique for pixel-perfect results.

Method 1: The 'Copy as Picture' Trick for Quick Results

This is the fastest way to get a significantly better image than a simple screenshot or standard copy-paste. It uses a built-in Excel feature that many people overlook. It copies the chart's vector information, which allows it to scale much more cleanly.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

  1. Select Your Chart: Click once on the chart you want to export. Make sure the chart area itself is selected, not one of the individual elements inside it. You'll see a border around the entire chart.

  2. Find 'Copy as Picture': On the Home tab of the Excel ribbon, click the small dropdown arrow next to the 'Copy' button. From the menu, select ‘Copy as Picture’.

  3. Choose Your Settings: A small dialog box will pop up with two options:

    • Appearance: You have two choices here. 'As shown on screen' copies what you currently see, while 'As shown when printed' instructs Excel to use the printer-quality driver to render a higher-fidelity version. Always choose ‘As shown when printed’ for the best quality.

    • Format: You also have two choices. 'Picture' is typically a vector format (like EMF), which is ideal because it's scalable. 'Bitmap' is a standard raster image. Always choose ‘Picture’.

    In short, your go-to settings here are ‘As shown when printed’ and ‘Picture’. Click OK.

  4. Paste and Save Your Image: Your high-quality chart is now copied to your clipboard. You can paste this into a tool like PowerPoint, Google Slides, a Word document, or an email. To save it as a standalone image file (like a PNG or JPG), you can paste it into a simple image editor like Paint (Windows) or Preview (Mac), Microsoft Word, or PowerPoint, and then save it from there. In PowerPoint, for example, you can right-click the pasted chart and select 'Save as Picture'.

This method is fantastic for 90% of use cases. It's fast, easy, and produces a drastically better result than a standard copy-paste. The exported image will have clear text and sharp lines, even when resized.

Method 2: Save as PDF for Infinite Scalability

If you need a true vector version of your chart that can be scaled up to the size of a billboard without losing any quality, exporting it as a PDF is your best bet. A PDF preserves the chart as a collection of lines, shapes, and fonts rather than pixels, making it perfectly scalable.

This method is ideal for graphic designers who need to incorporate the chart into professional design software like Adobe Illustrator or for print documents where an ultra-high resolution is non-negotiable.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

  1. Select the Chart: First, click on the Excel chart you wish to export to ensure it’s the active element.

  2. Go to 'Save As': Navigate to File > Save As. Choose the location where you want to save your file.

  3. Change 'Save as type' to PDF: In the 'Save As' dialog box, click on the 'Save as type' dropdown menu and select PDF (*.pdf).

  4. Access Options: Before saving, click the 'Options...' button. This is the crucial step. In the Options dialog, under 'Publish what', select 'Chart'. This ensures that Excel exports only your selected chart instead of the entire worksheet. Click OK.

  5. Save: Click 'Save' to export your chart as a PDF.

You now have a perfect, vector-based PDF of your chart. If you need it in an image format like PNG, you can open the PDF in a design tool (like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer) or a professional PDF editor (like Adobe Acrobat Pro) and export it from there. Free online PDF-to-PNG converters are also an option, but be sure to check their output for any quality loss.

Method 3: The PowerPoint Method for Maximum Control Over Resolution

This final method is the power user's choice for generating a truly high-resolution image file with complete control over the final DPI (Dots Per Inch). It uses PowerPoint's surprisingly powerful image export engine, which can be configured to produce extremely high-quality files perfect for professional printing or high-spec digital displays.

There are two levels to this method: a quick and easy way, and an advanced (but more powerful) way that involves a one-time change to your computer's settings.

Level 1: The Quick PowerPoint Paste

  1. Format a Blank Slide: Open PowerPoint and create a new, blank presentation. For optimal results, you can go to the Design tab > Slide Size > Custom Slide Size and set the dimensions to match a standard letter or A4 size page dimensions. This gives your chart more space to work with.

  2. Copy Your Excel Chart: Go back to Excel and copy your chart (a regular CTRL+C is fine here).

  3. Paste Special in PowerPoint: In PowerPoint, instead of a normal paste, go to the Home tab, click the dropdown under Paste and select ‘Paste Special...’.

  4. Choose 'Picture (Enhanced Metafile)': From the list of options, choose ‘Picture (Enhanced Metafile)’. This is a high-quality vector format that will look crisp in PowerPoint. Click OK. Resize the pasted chart to fill most of the slide.

  5. Save as Picture: Now, simply right-click the chart and choose ‘Save as Picture...’. Select your desired format (PNG is usually best for charts as it preserves crisp lines and text better than JPG). You will get a high-quality raster image file that is significantly better than a standard screenshot.

Level 2: The Registry Edit for Ultimate Resolution (Windows Users)

For those who need print-quality (e.g., 300 DPI) images or higher, you can make a one-time adjustment in the Windows Registry that tells PowerPoint to always export images at a much higher resolution.

Disclaimer: This involves editing the Windows Registry. Always be careful and consider backing up your registry before making changes.

  1. Close all Microsoft Office applications.

  2. Open the Registry Editor by pressing Windows Key + R, typing regedit, and hitting Enter.

  3. Navigate to the following key (the version number may vary depending on your Office version, 16.0 corresponds to Office 2016/2019/365):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\PowerPoint\Options

  1. Right-click in the right-hand pane, select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value.

  2. Name the new value exactly ExportBitmapResolution and press Enter.

  3. Double-click on your new ExportBitmapResolution value. Change the Base to Decimal and enter your desired DPI value. For example, enter 300 for print-quality files. Click OK.

  4. Close the Registry Editor.

Now, whenever you use the File > Save As process in PowerPoint to save a slide as a PNG or JPG, it will use this new 300 DPI setting, giving you an extremely large, high-resolution file perfect for any purpose.

Final Thoughts

Saving a crisp, high-resolution chart from Excel shouldn't be a source of frustration. Whether you need a quick and clean image using the 'Copy as Picture' function, a perfectly scalable vector via a PDF export, or ultimate control using PowerPoint, you have strong options that go far beyond a simple screenshot. Choose the method that best fits your final needs and say goodbye to pixelated charts for good.

Of course, the need for these workarounds highlights the everyday friction of manual reporting. Constantly building charts in spreadsheets and then struggling to export them for presentations is time-consuming. Here at Graphed, we focus on eliminating that friction entirely. By connecting directly to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce, we let you create beautiful, professional, and real-time dashboards just by asking questions in plain English. There’s no exporting or manual updating needed - just share a link to a live dashboard that’s always accurate and looks sharp, saving you from the cycles of copy, paste, and reformat. Give Graphed a try and let us automate the busywork for you.