RE: CellQuest->Word: Where are the plots?

From: Leary, James F. (jleary@utmb.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 30 2000 - 17:12:08 EST


Bob -- One of the ways Word makes such large files is if you try to put a
figure in a "text box". Don't ever do that. Word tries to convert all the
graphics to a format allowable by the text box, creating VERY large files.
If you instead simply insert figures as gif or jpeg images, and size
appropriately, the file size remains much smaller (e.g. 10-fold). I "desktop
publish" some of our papers using Word and automatically print to a PDF file
in one simple click within Word (Print to PDF" interfacing to Adobe Writer).
This does not provide the sophistication of Framemaker or other more serious
desktop publishing software, but it is quick, easy and cheap.  -- Jim Leary

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert C. Leif, Ph.D. [mailto:rleif@rleif.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2000 5:01 PM
To: cyto-inbox
Subject: RE: CellQuest->Word: Where are the plots?



From: Bob Leif
To: cyto-inbox

My experience has been that the use of Word for large technical documents is
an exercise in masochism. My solution is to use a documentation creation
program, Adobe FrameMaker, and save to Adobe Acrobat PDF format. However,
some of my experience may be relevant to Word. Often when I do object
linking and embedding, OLE, the files are very large. This is the result of
the entire file being copied into the document for each OLE object.
Therefore, the original files should be split into single figures or
spreadsheets etc. I use OLE because it allows me to go back and reformat the
source data. You may be able to do the same thing with Word, if you first
make an outer text box and place your OLE object in that box.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff_Carrell@hgsi.com [mailto:Jeff_Carrell@hgsi.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 12:44 PM
To: cyto-inbox
Subject: CellQuest->Word: Where are the plots?



Hello All,

We are compiling a HUGE report which consists of a lot of flow cytometry
data: plots, histograms, and stats generated by CellQuest.  Because the
report is being written in Word, for a while we simply selected the items
we wanted from CellQuest, then copied to the clipbaord, then pasted to
Word.  This seemed to work just fine for a while, until the document grew
to enormous proportions...

Now, it seems that sometimes when the Word document is opened, some of the
plots appear as a big red "X", and no matter how the page is moved, closed,
re-opened, the plot can't be seen.  At first we thought somehow the problem
was a PC-to-Mac thing, because some people are using one or the other and
we're all connected by a network.  It doesn't seem to be confined to Macs
or PCs, so we've ruled that out.

I searched the archive but couldn't find this exactly (much discussion of
Coulter Elite software)--Has anyone experienced this?  Is it the size of
the document?  Why does it happen intermittantly?  Is there a better way of
showing the data?  I saw some reference made to other formats (eg GIF) but
we've found the resolution is lowered when converting to these graphical
formats.

I am anxious to hear what thoughts are out there.

thanks,
Jeff Carrell

Cell Biology Department
Human Genome Sciences, Inc.
9410 Key West Avenue
Rockville, MD  20850
(301) 610-5790 ext.2231



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Mar 10 2001 - 19:31:14 EST