ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > Working with files and reports > Saving reports and data > Saving charts

Saving charts

Overview

Although you can save an entire report which contains a chart (see Saving documents), there may be occasions when all you actually want to save is an individual chart. This is easily done - just right click over the relevant chart and either select Save this chart to a file or Save all charts to a file from the menu which appears. The former option will save just the chart you actually clicked on, whereas the latter will save all the charts in the set. Selecting either option will cause the Save chart window to be displayed, where you can specify a name and location for the file and choose the format it should be saved in.

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The 'Save chart' window

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Formats in which charts can be saved

The Save chart window

You will probably be familiar with the Save chart window already, as it's based on the standard 'save' window used in almost all Windows software.

It's often very useful to enlarge this window so you can see more files. You can do this by dragging the bottom right corner with the mouse.

Figure 1. The Save chart window.

Files list

The files list shows the folders and files of the selected type (see Save as type, below) stored in the current location. You can double click a folder to open it, or you can click a file to transfer its name to the File name field.

File name

Use this field to enter a name for the file. You can enter up 255 characters, but your entry can't contain any of the following characters: \ / : * ? " < > |.

Save as type

You can save charts in a number of different formats, and you should choose the one you wish to use from the list displayed here. The formats themselves are described in detail below.

Formats in which charts can be saved

Windows bitmap format

Windows bitmap format (also known as BMP format) is supported by just about every Windows program, but it has two major disadvantages - firstly, scaling a bitmap can't be done without losing quality (because it's a raster graphics format, and secondly, bitmap files tend to be rather large.

Graphics interchange format

Graphics interchange format (also known as GIF format) is also widely supported and is one of the graphics formats used on web pages. GIF images saved by ANY-maze are compressed, so they don't take up too much space, although being a raster graphics format, they can't be scaled without losing image quality.

JPEG format

JPEG format is another raster graphics format used for web pages, and is also widely supported in many programs (Word and PowerPoint, for example). JPEG has the advantage that files are compressed, but the technique used is really designed to work well with photographs - graphics images (such as charts) tend to look a little blurred.

Tagged Image File format

Tagged Image File format (also known as TIFF or TIF format) is widely used in the publishing and graphic design industries, and was designed to allow images to be shared across different operating systems (e.g. Windows and Macs). Again, it's a raster graphics format, which means it can't be easily scaled without losing image quality.

Portable Network Graphics format

Portable Network Graphics format (or PNG format) is a vector graphics format that supports lossless compression. It is the most-used lossless image compression format on the internet, and PNG images can be scaled without losing quality - so it is probably the best option to use when saving charts.

Enhanced metafile format

Enhanced metafile format (also known as EMF format) is another vector graphics format, which means that EMF images can be scaled without losing quality. The EMF format was designed by Microsoft, but is not supported by as many programs as the other formats described here. However, if you want to save a chart and later include it in a Word document, this might be a good format to choose.

ANY-maze help topic T0994