Most of us, in some way or another, tend to use Excel for data collation and visualization. Why do we want to visualize data? Aside from a desire to present it in a meaningful fashion, we generally graph or chart a series of data with a view to distributing it to a wider audience – making it easier for others to comprehend. Nitro PDF Professional can help you do this.
In this post, we’re going to demonstrate how to use Nitro Pro to easily and securely collate your graphs and data – making them smaller in file-size and more practical to distribute.
Often, users will simply create the chart in Excel, and then copy and paste it into a Word document. Many people don’t realize that in Word, you can simply right-click the chart, select ‘Edit Data’, and proceed to open the underlying data, in full, in Excel.
This is not ideal if you want to restrict the ability to edit or access your data!
Creating a PDF file from Excel
Once you have your graph in Excel, there are two ways to get your Excel data or chart into a PDF.
- ‘Create PDF’ With Nitro Pro’s inbuilt Microsoft Office functionality, you can easily create a PDF straight from Excel’s menu bar.
- From the Clipboard. For quick and easy creation, you can just copy your chart and/or data, and use Nitro Pro’s ‘Create from Clipboard’ function.
Using the ‘Create PDF’ function
With Nitro Pro’s Office integration – it’s just a click of a button – plus, you get added security and creation functionality, giving you greater control over the type of PDF file you end up with.
This method is particularly handy should you want to create a secure PDF. With Nitro Pro’s security settings, you can set the resultant PDF file to require a password, restrict access privileges – editing, printing, and extraction – and even encrypt the document.
Creating your PDF file from the Clipboard
When time is a factor, and you simply want to get your chart or data into a PDF file, as quickly and simply as possible, using Nitro Pro’s ‘Create from Clipboard’ function is an easy solution.
- In Excel, simply click on the chart itself – or, select the cells containing the chart and data if you want both– and copy them.
- Switch from Excel to Nitro Pro, and select the ‘From Clipboard’ button in the ‘Create and Convert’ tab.
The end result is a single, static PDF file containing the data and chart – or just the chart, depending on what you copied to the clipboard.
If you want to distribute multiple charts in PDF using this method, you can quickly combine them with these additional steps:
- In Nitro Pro, on the Create and Combine ribbon, click Combine Files
- Click the Include all open PDF documents checkbox
- Click Create.
