Pasting and Embedding a Diagram on a Slide
When you embed a Visio 2007 diagram in PowerPoint 2007, you add an editable copy of the diagram to a slide. You can then edit in place, which means that you can open the Visio 2007 drawing window from within PowerPoint 2007. The original Visio 2007 drawing file, however, doesn’t reflect any changes you make. An advantage of working this way is that, unlike the diagram linking method, this technique doesn’t include any links to update or break. You don’t have to worry about moving or renaming the original drawing file. If you want to revise the diagram specifically for the purposes of the presentation without affecting the original—for example, modifying colors for projection—embedding is what you want to do.
Inside Out: Pasting from Visio 2007 into PowerPoint 2007When you copy from Visio 2007 and paste in PowerPoint 2007 using the Paste command or Ctrl+V, you’re in fact embedding a Visio 2007 object on a slide. Double-click the embedded object to edit it. |
The drawback to embedding is that it increases the file size of your presentation by storing potentially large Visio 2007 objects in the presentation file.
Embed when
You want to be able to revise the diagram as it appears on the slide, but don’t need to change the original Visio 2007 file.
You want to edit your diagram within PowerPoint 2007 without having to switch between programs.
You don’t want to track a separate Visio 2007 drawing file along with your PowerPoint 2007 file, and presentation file size is not an issue.
You want to create an animated build of your Visio 2007 diagram in PowerPoint 2007.
You want to use only some shapes from a diagram on your slide, and you want to be able to edit those shapes.
Embedding Shapes or Diagrams on a Slide
You can embed selected shapes or the contents of an entire drawing page. The simplest way to embed shapes is to select the ones you want in Visio 2007, press Ctrl+C to copy them, and then display a slide in PowerPoint 2007 and press Ctrl+V to paste them. You can also drag shapes from Visio 2007 to PowerPoint 2007, but you’ll remove the shapes from Visio 2007 altogether unless you press Ctrl while dragging. Pressing the Ctrl key as you drag always drags a copy of a Visio 2007 shape.
Follow these steps to embed an entire Visio 2007 page on a PowerPoint 2007 slide:
1. | In Visio 2007, display the diagram you want to embed. If the diagram has multiple pages, display the page that you want to embed. |
2. | Make sure nothing is selected, and then choose Edit, Copy Drawing. In PowerPoint 2007, display the slide to which you want to add the diagram, and then press Ctrl+V (or click the Paste button on the Clipboard group of the Home ribbon). PowerPoint 2007 pastes the diagram as an embedded object that you can edit by double-clicking it. |
Editing an Embedded Diagram in Place
To edit an embedded diagram in PowerPoint 2007, double-click it. A Visio 2007 drawing window opens, as Figure 13-4 shows, and a special set of Visio 2007 menus and toolbars (technically called the in-place editing controls) temporarily replaces most of the PowerPoint 2007 menus and tools. If your original Visio 2007 file had stencils, they open as well. You can even add shapes by dragging from one of the open stencils or by opening the stencil you need. After you finish editing, click on the slide outside the Visio 2007 drawing window to return control to PowerPoint 2007.
Figure 13-4. When you embed a Visio 2007 diagram on a slide, you can double-click the diagram to open it in place for editing.
Linking and Embedding Multiple-Page Diagrams
When you have a multiple-page Visio 2007 diagram that you want to use in a PowerPoint 2007 presentation, you must copy it one page at a time. Only the page displayed at the time you choose the Copy Drawing command appears on the slide when you paste. You can use the Paste button or command in PowerPoint 2007 to paste each page as an embedded object or the Paste Special command to paste each page as a linked object.