Pattern Fills in Bar Graphs - Workaround!

[Christine]

This may not work in everyone's situation but it fits ours to a T!

We work with A LOT of graphs. Many are generated in Delta Graph and then
formatted in Illustrator and then others are simply generated while pulling
together a presentation (originally through Microsoft Graph in 2000 and now
through Excel in 2007).

The pattern fills have always been heavily used so we have a full set of
Illustrator swatches that match the Office pattern fills exactly (using the
same colors as PPT), so I took the base file that we used for the Illustrator
swatch and saved it as a jpg.

In PPT, I picked "picture or texture fill" when editing the data series and
then browsed for my jpg file.

The default was "stretch" but once I changed it to stack the diagonal
pattern fill looked PERFECT!

Woo HOO!

I should add that the Illustrator swatches weren't all that easy to generate
originally. They were painstakingly worked on over time to stack and tile
correctly in Illustrator so the diagonal lines matched up. I suspect that
they worked so easily in PPT because they matched so well in Illustrator.

Just wanted to share my work around.

Christine

 

[Sandy Johnson]

Thanks Christine!

 

[Echo S]

It's a good workaround, thanks for posting it.

We've suggested in the past that people can create their own patterns, even
in PPT (draw the pattern, group the objects, right-click and save as
picture), and use those as fills. It can be tedious to get the things to
tile properly, though, so it's really great that you have those tile images
around already!