Working with Microsoft Office^®

You can export your finished diagram to Windows^®-based programs, especially Microsoft Office^® software such as Word^® and PowerPoint^®.

You can quickly add professional diagrams to your memos and eye-catching charts to your presentations!

Go ahead! Impress your colleagues and boss with graphic design skills you didn't even know you had!

"Export to ____" Buttons
The easiest way to transfer a SmartDraw drawing into another Windows^®-based program is to simply click on one of the Office toolbar buttons at the top left of the SmartDraw toolbar called the Quick Access Toolbar.

Choose Word^®, Excel^®, or PowerPoint^®! The button will open the selected program for you—if you don't have it running already—and insert your entire drawing. It's that simple!

Before exporting to PowerPoint^® you can use the PowerPoint^® tab to animate your drawing! You decide which parts of your diagram appear when you click during a slide show by simply selecting a shape and assigning a step number to it.

Exporting to PDF

If you want to share your SmartDraw document as a PDF, all you have to do is click on the red PDF button in the Quick Access Toolbar in the upper left corner of your screen. You'll have a chance to name and save your PDF where you choose.

Paste Special

Another way to transfer a SmartDraw drawing to another Windows^®-based program is to paste an OLE Link using the other program's Paste Special command usually found under the Edit menu or tab.

Because Paste Special creates a link between the other program and the original SmartDraw file, any changes you make to the original SmartDraw drawing will automatically appear in the drawing pasted elsewhere.

To use Paste Special, first save the drawing in SmartDraw (pasting a link will not work if the file is not saved first), then select and copy your SmartDraw drawing. In the other program, under Paste Special select Paste Link.

About OLE Linking

OLE linking creates a shortcut between the drawing in another program and the original SmartDraw file. When you simply copied-and-pasted (embedded) the drawing, the other program only remembered that the drawing came from SmartDraw but not the particular file it came from.

When you paste a link to the actual SmartDraw file, any changes to the original drawing will be automatically reflected in the linked drawing.

This feature can be a real time-saver if you need to use a single SmartDraw drawing in many different Microsoft Office^® documents.

For example, let's say you want to always keep an updated version of your flowchart in three different corporate documents simultaneously: a Word^® document, a PowerPoint^® presentation, and an Excel^® spreadsheet. You need not update all three documents. Just update the linked SmartDraw drawing, and the documents will all automatically update themselves!