Maureen Thompson called to ask how to insert a one-page Excel spreadsheet into a PowerPoint presentation. I told her the easiest way would be to center the spreadsheet on her monitor and to then press her PrtScr (PrintScreen) key. Doing so would copy everything on the screen to the "invisible Windows clipboard."

Next, I told Maureen to click Start>All Programs>Accessories>Paint, followed by clicking Edit>Paste. This pasted the captured spreadsheet onto the Windows Paint "canvas" as a "picture." To eliminate the extraneous Desktop items that were captured along with the spreadsheet, I had her click the "Select" tool in the upper right corner of the toolbar and to draw a rectangle around the spreadsheet, with her left mouse-button depressed.

Finally, I told Maureen to click Edit>Cut, File>New and Edit>Paste to display the cropped spreadsheet as a stand-alone picture, which she could name using File>Save As.... The spreadsheet image could then be placed in a presentation slide using PowerPoint's Insert>Picture.

About Windows Paint

"Paint" is a minimum-feature image-editor that has always come with Windows — but it can be useful at times. Simple graphics can be drawn using the toolbar's six bottom tools. The colorbar displays two colored squares, with the top one designating a graphic's "line" or "outline" color and the bottom one indicating its "fill" color. To choose a different line color, right-click any color shown in the colorbar. Left-click any color to choose a different fill.

If you have chosen, say, a red line and blue fill, any graphic you draw will have a red outline. Click the "paint bucket" to fill the graphic with blue.

Lines are normally one pixel thick, but can be made thicker by first clicking the "straight line" tool or "freeform line" tool and choosing from a list of widths displayed below the toolbar. The "spraycan" tool will fill a graphic with a "splatter" effect. Click Help to learn about using the pencil, brush, and eraser tools. Click HERE to learn about adding text to a picture.

Digital photos can be edited by clicking File>Open, and browsing to the target picture; but Paint's image-editing capabilities are pretty slim. However, you can re-size a picture by clicking Image>Stretch/Skew. You can magnify a picture's view up to 800% (which allows for easy pixel-by-pixel editing) but no brightness or contrast tools exist, as are found in Irfanview or Picasa (free from www.irfanview.com and www.picasa.com).

Another limitation of Paint is its print resolution of about 100 DPI (dots per inch). This is fine for sending pictures as email attachments or displaying them on a Web page, but can be somewhat mushy-looking when printed on paper.

Getting back to placing a one-page spreadsheet in PowerPoint, you can click Insert>Table, and manually build a simulation of an Excel file. This would give you the ability to easily change any in the spreadsheet, since it would be a "live" table, rather than a "picture" of one.