Sunday, July 12, 2009

Ruby & Excel: Inserting Pictures Into Cells

A reader recently asked how to insert an image from their PC into a cell in an Excel worksheet. So if you have a couple of minutes, I'll demonstrate how to insert an image, specify the exact position, and resize the image.

UPDATE: It seems that the Worksheet.Pictures.Insert() method that I demonstrated below, though frequently used, is not actually officially documented in the Excel Object Model Reference. See this newer article for the officially documented method.

Let's start by connecting to an open Excel worksheet:


require 'win32ole'
xl = WIN32OLE.connect('Excel.Application')
ws = xl.ActiveSheet

Inserting the Image

To insert a picture into a worksheet, call the Worksheet object's Pictures.Insert() method, passing it the filename of the image to insert:

pic = ws.Pictures.Insert('C:\Pictures\Image1.jpg')

The Pictures.Insert() method inserts a new Picture object into the Pictures collection and returns a reference to the new Picture object, which we've assigned to the variable pic.

Positioning the Image

OK, now that you've got the picture inserted into the worksheet, you probably want to specify its exact position, perhaps aligned with a certain range of cells. Let's start by defining that range of cells, from cell C3 to cell F5:

range = ws.Range('C3:F5')

We want the picture aligned with the top/left corner of our range, so we'll set our Picture object's Top and Left properties to be the same as our Range object's Top and Left properties.

pic.Top = range.Top
pic.Left = range.Left

Resizing the Image

Now that we have the top/left position set, let's move on to specifying the width and height of the picture. The original image has an aspect ratio, which is the image's width divided by its height. An image that is 800x600 pixels could be said to have an aspect ratio of 4:3. When resizing an image, you may wish to maintain its original aspect ratio, to avoid making the image appear stretched in one direction or the other.

By default, a Picture object in Excel has its aspect ratio locked, so that when you change either the width or the height, the other dimension is automatically adjusted to preserve the aspect ratio.

You adjust the width and/or height of a Picture object by setting its---wait for it---Width and Height properties. With the aspect ratio locked, we can set the image to fill the width of the range...

pic.Width = range.Width

...or to fill the height of the range...

pic.Height = range.Height

...but we cannot successfully apply both settings without first unlocking the aspect ratio.

To unlock the Picture's aspect ratio, you set the Picture object's ShapeRange.LockAspectRatio property to false:

pic.ShapeRange.LockAspectRatio = false

Now that we have unlocked the aspect ratio, we can set the picture's width and height to match the range's width and height:

pic.Width = range.Width
pic.Height = range.Height

The Width and Height properties are just numerical values. So you could instead do something like this:

pic.Width = 400
pic.Height = 300

And that, my friends, is how you insert, position, and resize an image in Excel.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments, and thanks for stopping by!

2 comments:

Charles Roper said...

David, do you know where Pictures.Insert is officially documented? I've hunted high and low for docs, but all I can find are lots of references in blog posts and the like.

Is it an undocumented feature?

David Mullet said...

Thanks, Charles, for bringing this to my attention! I've just posted a new article about this.

David