Steps for Creating Publication-Quality Figures using Excel and Powerpoint (2003 edition)

This is of fringe interest, and soon to be invalidated technology
probably, but I'm damned if I'm going to figure this out again.

First, in Excel:
- Autogenerate the figures in Excel based on my data. (use a previous
figure I made as a template if there's one that applies, that

- Important: Right click the middle of the chart, go to Format Chart Area
-> Font, and uncheck Auto scale. That way I can choose the font once,
and it won't change every time you resize the chart!

- Get it looking exactly the way I want, with the exception of:
* Extra bits of text
* Extra graphics applied to it
* Any other tricky modifications or overlays
* Sizing only in the ballpark of what it needs be. It looks like it's
actually easier to match the sizes of multiple plots to each other in
powerpoint, because you can enter in the dimensions of objects numerically.

Now in Powerpoint:
- Make a slideshow with 8 1/2 x 11-shaped slides, and dotted lines
indicated the maximum width for the figures (I'm submitting to Perception,
which uses 1.675 inch margins for figures, including all the text
associated with them.) Easiest if I put the dotted lines into a master
slide, so it automatically shows up in any new slides I create. Also a
good idea to turn on Snap objects to grid (which you can define the
spacing of), and Display grid on screen, in View -> Grid and Guides.

- Copy each figure to a separate slide from Excel, placing it
approximately where it should go

- Ungroup each (saying yes to converting to a microsoft office drawing
object), then ungroup again. This gives me the ability to fiddle with each
element of the figure individually. Moving multiple at once, and the Align
object commands are particularly handy at this point.

- To resize the graph to fit the area, select just the data area and the
axis tick labels, not the axis titles or legend, and group, then resize.
I sometimes had to move around the axis titles a bit.

Complicated! But fast once I got the hang of it, and allows for the most
important aspect of all: small changes, to the data or the formatting of
the graph, without doing everything all over again.