Sean Wallbridge
A colleague asked tonight if there was a quick and easy way to save a piece of Smart Art he created in an Office App (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook – and I wish, in OneNote). My response was two options (I’m sure others can think of more) and I figured I’d share them for others to use too…
Yep, I’m talking about SmartArt again. Call it a nerdy man crush I guess…
Option 1 – Screen Capture
Ok, this one is obvious. If you have SnagIt (or not, but seriously… why not?) capture a screenshot of your lovely Smart Art and then save that screenshot as a file in SnagIt or in your favourite graphics application
Option 2 – Do it right in your Office Application!
This is the hidden gem I picked up watching my buddy Mike do once (Salo, shout out buddy)…
1. Select your piece of Smart Art and choose Copy
2. Perform a Paste – but do a Paste … Special right in your application (i.e. on a new line in Word or wherever)
3. Choose the format you want to save it as (I like PNG for example)…
4. Right click on the newly embedded image and choose “Save as Picture”
5. Save the file wherever…
Tada!
Thank you so much….I was ready to just retype twenty complicated charts when I saw this simple solution. Microsoft’s instructions were not clear. Thank you for being a decent person, sharing your knowledge in a clear manner and making my life better today. Cheers.
Thanks a tonne. It works
Thank you – the screen shots really helped me. I was stuck on a simple detail. Appreciate this – as does my department.
Thanks a lot !!
I plan to use this on a future blog. Thank you very much for sharing this technique.
I love the “Paste Special…” technique that you shared here. I didn’t know this before and it will be very useful throughout my career! 🙂
Thank you! And how can I change the size of the image? I need a very big quality and when I save it, th picture
comes out as 77 kB.