devgrind

A question to all the project managers and other folks concerned with project planning out there: How do you embed gantt charts taken from MS Project into a MS Word document? Sounds easy? Well, there are a few constraints that must be satisfied:

• It must be possible to rotate the chart — after embedding it or on the way.
• The embedded chart must be resizable without quality loss, i.e. it must transformed into in some kind of vectorized form, or in very high resolution.
• The Word file must be readable & editable on machines where MS Project isn’t installed (in order to collaboratively edit a document).
• The resulting Word document must not exceed a reasonable size, i.e. its okay for a document to gain a few MB by adding a one-page chart.
• The process of converting/embedding must be reasonably simple so that it can be repeated iteratively, i.e. it shouldn’t take more than a fistful of steps.

According to my personal experience, its an almost impossible job to do. After researching this problem and doing some tedious trial-and-error work for several hours, I found a way:

• print the chart as a high-quality PDF with embedded fonts using Adobe’s PDF driver
• open the PDF in Acrobat
• rotate
• save as EPS
• insert the EPS into the Word doc

This works — if I perform these steps on my colleague’s machine. I tried this on my machine, but it won’t work. Exporting from Acrobat as Word doc works sometimes, but shows rather indeterministic behavior and sometimes leads to a mangled mess. Other approaches, such as going via WMF, EMF or directly embedding the MPP as an object, failed right away.
I assume there is an easier way to do this which works on any machine (with the necessary software) — any suggestions?

Filed by Arne at 5:34 pm under organization, tools, writing
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