Hi,

I was wondering if there are any good workflows or best practises for dealing with large numbers of charts and tables in MS Word, presuming most of them derive data from Excel.

For example:
  • Linked charts, or pictures only?
  • "In Line with text" or wrapped format?
  • Independent charts or nested in tables?
  • Enhanced metafile or simply a picture?

I am having a hard time achieving consistent throughout the whole document. E.g., I have some charts as "in line", and other as wrapped next to them. It would be fine, but when captions come into play, it turns out they are treated differently. In "wrapped" format, Word inserts another textbox, with significant amount of space between the caption and picture. With in "In line" caption is normal text. However, when you have inline, another set of difficulties come into play, e.g. it becomes a lot more difficult to simply move a chart to the next column. Nested tables seem to work best for now, but the trial and error, doing and redoing is simply too long...

Another big problem I have is keeping styles and sizes consistent. In excel its too easy to forget the margins of a printed page, but when it all gets copied, pasted, and resized into Word, captions and labels became of different sizes. I would presume discipline in excel could solve that. But then, there are other questions - e.g. keep data linked or not, if corrections are expected in the future? I tried making excel files with all charts and data for each Word, but it becomes tiresome with different row and column sizes for each table. The best workaround I found was to arrange tables diagonally in excel, or keep them in different worksheets. But too complicated with many charts. Soo you see, I am quite puzzled here