General ⇒ Powerpoint and Latex, or how to create figures easily

[josephwright]

Sorry if I wasn't clear. What I do is use Tikz, and set up "externalization" (this is nicely explained in the pgfplots manual: I use pgfplots a lot). If I then do externalization in DVI mode, I get a set of EPS files, one for each plot I have. I then open those to paste into whatever.

[moshiko]

Now I got your point -- but this is exactly the opposite of what I am looking to.

I would like to draw my figures in Powerpoint and only add tex code where needed.
I would like to avoid "programing" the figure in Tikz.

thanks,
-moshiko.

[josephwright]

Challenging, not least because PowerPoint is not really meant for this. I do draw a lot of things in a drawing program, but one with proper export options. You are likely to have to stick to something like saving your PowerPoint pages as PDFs, then include them (clipping if needed) using \includegraphics or the pdfpages package.

[meho_r]

From what you've said, it seems that:

• • 1. PowerPoint isn't very well suited for high-quality presentations at all ("bells-and-whistles"-only?) @frabjous, I understand the horror you're talking about
  • 2. Being unable to import vector formats which are standards (.svg, .eps) makes it a joke (I just checked OpenOffice.org Impress, it does support both of them)
  • 3. Reduction of resolution without any question or at least providing an option which can prevent/correct that — I dare to say — megastupid behaviour, can be described only by this
  • 4. You'd really do yourself a big favor if you invest some time into beamer or powerdot
  • 5. You may use PDF files for presentations avoiding PP completely. I even used Scribus for the purpose couple of times (and it has a limited support for LaTeX, which makes things very interesting).