Over the years OLE technology became increasingly outdated5 and is not perfectly supported by Sharepoint and other modern Office tools. In addition, of course, it was never supported on Linux or on the Mac, whereas Msc-generator now has a GUI for both.
Therefore a new way to add charts to Office documents has been developed in v8.0, called alt-text embedding. In this method the chart is inserted as a PNG image, where the alt-text (a.k.a. alternative text, usually used for accessibility or when the graphics cannot be shown) stores the chart text, language and other info. This method of embedding requires no special OS support, like OLE and also allows to apply various properties to the chart, such as cropping, outline, shadow, rotation, etc. Alt-text embedding is not compatible with OLE embedding in any which way.
Both the CLI6 and MFC7 GUIs of Msc-generator can now work with alt-text embedding the following ways.
pptx
extension) and simultaneously edit all the charts
embedded in it. It is possible to copy snippets between the charts, but also to add a new one.
Note that you cannot save the PPT file, if it is opened in PowerPoint, as PowerPoint locks
the file for writing. Also, PPT files on Sharepoint drives may not merge well, when edited this
way. (CLI GUI only.)
Turning the setting Auto Paste Clipboard
on, will make Msc-generator automatically open any
chart copied to the clipboard (and come to the foreground) if the currently open chart has no unsaved
changes.
See Embedding Charts on how to use the command-line tool to embed and extract charts into and from PNG and PPT files.
Best common practice workflow You start editing the chart in Msc-generator.
At some point select File|Copy to Clipboard (CLI GUI) or Home|Copy Chart (alt-text) from the
ribbon (MFC GUI) and then simply paste into a PowerPoint or Word document.
(Turn Auto Paste Clipboard
on.)
Then any time later (with Msc-generator running),
1) cut the chart (and maybe other graphics elements or multiple charts) to the cliboard;
2) Msc-generator pops up automatically;
3) edit the chart;
4) Save; and
5) Paste the chart(s) (and other elements) back to the PowerPoint or Word document.
For example, it still uses 16-bit Windows metafiles
The CLI GUI can be invoked with msc-gen --gui
The MFC GUI can be invoked wit Msc-generator.exe
and supports
alt-text embedding since version 8.5.