When I copy and paste a Prism graph into PowerPoint 2000, the PowerPoint slide doesn't update to show the changes. Also, my bar fills don't look or print right and curves look ragged when printed.

Prism 4 and 5 for Windows offer you a choice for how you copy and paste graphs or layouts from Prism to PowerPoint. In the in the "File & Printer" tab of Prism Preferences dialog, you can choose to have Prism can copy the graph to the clipboard in WMF format, the newer EMF format, or both. The default is to copy both. This lets the program you paste into decide which one to use. This works fine with almost all programs. One exception is PowerPoint 2000 and Word 2000 (and Excel 2000, but few people paste graphs into Excel).

With PowerPoint 2000 and Word 2000, there are problems with both choices. The best solution would be to upgrade to a newer version of Microsoft Office. But if you stick with Office 2000, here are your choices:

Choose to copy as WMF only (or both WMF and EMF). With this choice, you'll be able to edit embedded graphs just fine.  Everything works great, until you try to print a bar graph or any graph that uses pattern fills (for example, if you fill an area under a XY graph, or a box you draw on the graph). All the patterns inside of drawn objects and bar graphs will print with a solid gray fill, even though they look fine on screen.

Choose to copy as EMF only. Everything looks fine on screen, patterns are printed correctly, but curves are printed ragged (at least from Word 2000; PowerPoint 2000 is ok). So, if you need to print curves you may want to switch to "WMF only" or "Both" choice. Another problem with "EMF only" choice is when you try to update the graph. When you double-click from PowerPoint, Prism comes up as it should. But after you make changes in Prism and close Prism to return to PowerPoint, the original version of the graph still appears within PowerPoint. The updates don't appear within PowerPoint. It is easy to work around this problem, once you know how to. After you are done making the changes in Prism, don't use the "Close and update" menu command. Instead, copy the graph (or layout) in Prism. Then switch to PowerPoint and paste. In other words, you double-click to edit the object, but then copy and paste the modified graph as if it were new. (One person found that pasting EMF into PP 2000 from Prism 5.00 took many minutes, while pasting WMF was instant.)

Note: If you change settings from EMF to WMF or Both, any graphs copied and pasted from Prism to PowerPoint before the setting was changed from EMF, won't update when changed in Prism. You'll need to copy and paste them again after the setting has been changed to WMF or Both.

Our suggestion: Set the preferences to copy as WMF (or both WMF and EMF since Office 2000 choose WMF when it can). When you make bar graphs, avoid all fill patterns. Instead make all bar graphs fill with a solid color, using black, white and shades of gray to distinguish bars (rather than fill pattern).