Downloading tutorial…

Sigh…

Before I begin with this post I must question myself: Why do i get in so much trouble?

Nuff said, lets get on topic.

One day I needed to include a chart on a flash animation and seriously I was careless on the complexity of the thing at hand.

First I tried the simplistic approach: Import as an image. The result was a little upseting, the image was imported but for my demise the quality was a lot lower… there were some artifacts on the texts and around the lines there was some aliasing that make the graph look wrong.

I just copy pasted it I swear.

Ok so whats the problem, if you see at the image at its original size you will notice some aliasing. If you still dont see it: here you have it in a side by side comparison:

Look at the category text or the numbers, The 0 in the bottom looks wrong.

Now if it looks wrong now, wait till you animate it or try some crazy stuff…

How do we fix it? Well flash has a way: Setting quality of the imported resources and enabling smoothing

Right click the resource in the library, select properties.

Then in the following screen make it match the way it looks below:

You should notice an improvement in the quality. BUT don’t try to zoom in too much because in the end its a bitmap and it will get pixelated.

But HEY! Probably you want to zoom that chart, and probably you want many more things, What can you do then?

Answer 1: In office make the chart so irrationally big so when you copy it you copy a massive image.
Answer 2: Try this little trick.

One little known feature of office is that it can export directly the charts to images.

to do this right click on some empty area inside the chart:

There it is, near the bottom, save as picture option.

Yeah, from here we can save a .png or .jpg. BUT what we really want is a yet obscure format known as: Enhanced Windows Metafile, This thing is actually vector based bitmap hybrid.

Now import the file to flash as you would normally do.

The fonts are imported as text, the graph is imported as many bitmaps.

If you try it with a 3D graph the result is bad to say the least since it works fine only for the text, but no fear all the simple 2D plain graphs are imported as actual vectors! and they can be modified at will in flash, isn’t that cool?

Well that’s it about importing charts.

Well there are also some charting utilities for flash, but its kinda hard to insert them on existing movies, as always it depends on what you need. Need to show off some charts only? then use this tools, there are even some open source, Need to use the charts inside an existing movie? then i would advice to keep it simple and down to just import the resource and animate it manually.

Download complete.