Mac Forum / Applications / PowerPoint / May 2008

I have the same problem. Not only with powerpoint, but also Canvas X on my MacBook. I suspect it has something to do with the Leopard OS. Both the new operation system and Office2008 suck!!! I cannot do many things I could before!!! They really suck!

By the way, if you know how to do it, please post it here! Thanks!

Thank you for your response.

I often generate graphs in FlowJo, which is software for analysis of data generated by flow cytometry, a commonly used technique in biological science. The graphics can either be saved as files or copied and then, in either case, pasted into powerpoint to generate a presentation. In previous versions of powerpoint, the graph could then be ungrouped, presumably converted to a drawing object, so that different aspects, such as labels, font sizes, etc., could be made uniform across presentations (particularly after re-sizing the graph). Without that functionality, or a suitable work-around, powerpoint2008 is almost useless to me.

You indicate that this feature may not have been included in office2008 because it is not supported by mac OS. However, this feature is functional on powerpoint from office 2004 in the same mac OS, so it seems unlikely that the mac OS (15.2) is the problem.

Matt-

Like "rheu031" above, the inability to ungroup graphs created in other applications is going to be disastrous for our research group and many others in our field. Without this function it will be extremely difficult to sync line and bar graphs for inclusion in oral and poster presentations. I hope that MS can come up with some type of resolution to this issue, as I can imagine the complaints are going to be overwhelming as more users switch to the new MS Office package.

The loss of the ability to ungroup and make alterations (like removing unneeded backgrounds) to pieces of clip art or vector graphics is indeed a big problem for designers and graphic production people like myself. I certainly hope Apple or MS is able to come up with a fix for this. As others have mentioned here, we shouldn't be Losing capabilities with upgrades. Thats just regressive and counter-productive.