PowerPoint Notes

Here's a question that I received from someone who once sent me an animated Christmas game! He's probably got a lot of other animated stuff that might get you either mad or mesmerized (or both!) -- but for now, here's his question: I'll spare you the details but can you now no longer ungroup charts in PowerPoint 2007?

The answer is yes, you can -- but the route to ungroup nirvana might be new -- but fear not, let me get you there:

1. First of all, create your chart -- and just to be on the safe side, duplicate the slide that contains the chart. That's because once you ungroup your chart, you can no longer edit the values within the chart.
2. Make sure you do not double-click the chart -- just select it, right-click the edge of the chart, and choose the Save as Picture option.
3. This brings up a dialog box of the same name -- now choose EMF within the Save as type dropdown box, provide a name and location, and save the chart as an EMF graphic.
4. Insert a new slide within the presentation, and then insert a graphic by first selecting the Insert tab of the Ribbon, and then clicking the Picture button.
5. In the resulting Insert Picture dialog box, navigate and choose the EMF graphic you saved previously, and click Insert to get back to your slide with the graphic inserted.
6. Next, select the graphic on the slide, right-click and choose Group | Ungroup. PowerPoint might warn you that this is an inserted picture, not a group. Disregard this warning and click Yes. Right-click the graphic again, and choose Group | Ungroup.
7. This should ungroup all the elements of the chart so that you can recolor them, add effects, or animate them individually of each other.

Labels: charts, graphics, powerpoint_2007

6 comments

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Thank you so much for posting this. This is nowhere on the Microsoft website and I have been dying to figure out why they REMOVED an important feature in a new version.

# posted by  Anonymous : 4:30 AM

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Yes, but what about the group/ungroup shortcut from 2003? It seems that ctrl+shift+g and ctrl+shift+h no longer work. You have us the toolbar uptop.

Anybody know?

# posted by  Anonymous : 12:27 PM

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Many thanks for this, but it doesn't completely work for me. It allows me to ungroup most elements but critically not the bars in a bar graph - the error bars, axes, titles etc. can be ungrouped but not the bars. Do you know any way around this? Many thanks indeed.

# posted by  James : 11:34 PM

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I'm grateful to find some comments on this topic. I was dumbfounded that MS would remove the user's ability to ungroup charts - I used this feature extensively both in PowerPoint and Word.

# posted by  Snooze : 5:53 AM

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James, I have not been able to find a way to ungroup the bars (not even to save them as a separate emf file!), but if there are not too many bars to deal with, I'll insert autoshapes and size them to match the bars, then delete the chart's bars. A very backwards technique, but it works!

# posted by  peachthecat : 1:39 AM

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So is there any way to ungroup each bar/line etc the way you could in Office 2003?

C'mon M$ stop taking away our features.

# posted by  PutridPundits : 11:29 PM

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