Floor Plans & Facilities Center

Copy Your Floor Plan to a Microsoft Office^® Application

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.

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!

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 next to the Microsoft Office^® buttons in the upper left corner of your toolbar.

You'll have a choice to name and save your PDF where you choose.

Editing the Embedded Drawing
When you paste your drawing into another program you are actually embedding it.

This means that the image in the other program is not just a simple picture of the SmartDraw drawing. The other program remembers that the drawing came from SmartDraw and allows you to edit and update the drawing within SmartDraw.

So to edit a SmartDraw drawing in another program, simply double-click.

Update the Drawing
When you are done, simply close the document. This will transfer the changes you made back to the drawing in wherever it is embedded.

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 th 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 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!