That was not a cheap shot from viol8ion - that was pure honesty. viol8ion demonstrates plenty of expertise. Likewise, I doubt that he was trying to insult anyone that uses MS products.
Microsoft Office applications produce RGB graphics that are intended for your inkjet printer or office color laser printer. Because they cannot produce CMYK or spot colors, they are inappropriate for large-scale professional printing on 4 or 6-color presses. While many RIPs can now convert RGB images to CMYK, most designers prefer to manually convert RGB images so that they are not surprised by the RIP's output.
If I need to import MS Excel charts into a page layout program (whether PageMaker, Quark or InDesign), I first print to a file using a virtual PostScript printer. I can then take the PDF or EPS output into Illustrator to convert RGB to CMYK and clean up any oddities that happen when going to PostScript (such as missing bullets).
The original question could be better answered if we knew whether we were talking about vector or bitmap graphics. MS Word's bitmap graphics are woeful and viol8ion's advice holds true. MS Word's vector graphics can be transferred using the virtual PostScript printer technique. The best option is to use the graphics before they were placed into MS Word.
- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?