Excel 2011 Rasterization Fail

To the left is a picture of a chart from Microsoft Excel 2011 (yes, 2011, I use Macs) which has been saved as a PDF file, then enlarged and cropped. As you can see, it has been rasterized at a very low resolution, which makes it unsuitable for use in: 1. Academic Posters, where the image must be enlarged considerably, 2: Scholarly Publications, which are intended to be printed at 600 DPI and therefore require high resolution or preferably vector graphics, and most to the point for me today, 3: Dissertations. Which are like publications except there's no page limit and marginal peer review. And no one reads them. But I digress.

To the right is the exact same chart from the same Excel file, subjected to the same regimen as the other chart, but saved from Microsoft Excel 2008.

It is possible that my inveterate perfectionism is blinding me to the fact that these two images are, in fact, equivalent. It appears that the bureaucracy at Microsoft which decides which features become reality in their Office suite regards these two images as equivalent. Perhaps if I just stopped caring about what my documents look like and embrace super low resolution rasterized images as the way the world works, I could see these images as equivalent. Or if I adopted a consistent artistic position that blurry blocky graphics make a wry, retro statement about our modern, technological world, and decided to make artistic statements in my technical publications, then I wouldn't be so angry about the inability of Excel 2011 to make proper vector charts. Unfortunately for me, I'm not ready yet to go that far.

I have ranted about Microsoft Office's rasterization decisions in the past, and as an eternal optimist, I'm always hoping that someone at Microsoft is paying attention. I keep believing that some overworked Microsoft engineer knows the shortcomings of their products and is doing her best to make sure that the next edition of Office will work correctly. Goodness knows, there are a lot of people at Microsoft working on the next iteration of 3D WordArt and rearranging the user interface so that we have to relearn where all the buttons are. And those things are much less important than fundamentals of image representation and display, which would seem to me to be key to any modern content creation program. But what do I know...

I spent an hour today, to no avail, trying every trick I know to convert the Excel 2011 chart into a vector graphic, like I have done so many times in Excel 2008. Finally, I borrowed a friend's laptop who had the old version still installed, and converted it in 30 seconds. It appears I'll be doing so periodically over the next few months...