Microsoft Office

Enhancing Your Work with Pictures and Drawings 22
Taking Pictures of Ranges
One of Excel’s best-kept secrets is its ability to copy and paste “live” pictures of cells and charts. You can
copy a cell or range and then paste a picture (as an object) of the cell or range on any worksheet or
chart. If you change the contents of a cell that’s in a picture, the picture changes.
To “take a picture” of a range:
1. Select the range.
2. Press Ctrl+C to copy the range.
3. Choose Home ➪ Clipboard ➪ Paste ➪ As Picture ➪ Paste Picture Link
The result is a live picture of the range you selected in Step 1.
If you use this feature frequently, you can save some time by adding Excel’s Camera tool to your Quick Access
Toolbar (QAT):
1. Right-click your QAT and choose Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
2. In the Customization tab of the Excel Options dialog box, select Command Not In The Ribbon
from the drop-down list on the left.
3. Select Camera from the list and click Add.
4. Click OK to close the Excel Options dialog box.
After you’ve added the Camera tool to your QAT, you can select a range of cells and click the Camera tool to
take a “picture” of the range. Then click in the worksheet, and Excel places a live picture of the selected range
on the worksheet’s draw layer. If you make changes to the original ranges, the changes are shown in the picture
of the range.
Most of the time, you don’t want the entire screen — just a portion of it. The solution is to crop the image
by choosing Picture Tools ➪ Format ➪ Size ➪ Crop. This command adds cropping marks to the corners of
the image. Just drag the cropping marks to crop the image.
Displaying a worksheet background image
If you want to use a graphic image for a worksheet’s background (similar to wallpaper on the Windows
desktop), choose Page Layout ➪ Page Setup ➪ Background and select a graphics file. The selected graphics
file is tiled on the worksheet. Unfortunately, worksheet background images are for on-screen display only.
These images do not appear when the worksheet is printed.
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