JAGGIES in pie charts

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Pie charts, especially 3D charts with exploded slices, can look bad on screen and worse when printed. Effectively, what's happening is that they're being printed at screen resolution, even though you're printing to a much higher resolution printer.

If you use PowerPoint 2000 or earlier on Windows 2000 or previous, here's the fix, courtesy of PowerPoint newgroup member Daniel Chait

• Choose Options from the Tools menu.
• Click the Print tab of the Options dialog box.
• Put a checkmark next to: Print Inserted Objects at Printer Resolution.
• Click OK. Your pie chart will print without the jaggies.

Note: This is an application-level setting, meaning that you only have to set it once to have it take effect for all your presentations.

We've since learned that this fix doesn't work in PowerPoint 2002 and later, and it doesn't work if you use PowerPoint 2000 under Windows XP.

Worse, charts now become jagged if you use a gradient fill on any of the slices; no need to explode them, and it happens even on 2D charts.

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