Export figure to Microsoft Outlook

Seeking a good way to email plots to my coworkers via Outlook. The following are not satisfactory: 1) From Matlab figure window, choose Edit > Copy Figure then paste within Outlook. Quality is poor. 2) Quality is better with Matlab's print utility (png, tif) but figure aspect ratio is not preserved. 3) Aspect ratio is preserved with the program http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/727-exportfig/content/exportfig.m but inserting the figure into Outlook is cumbersome (Insert > Picture then hunt for figure file).

The ideal solution would produce a high-quality figure with correct aspect ratio by (a) opening a new Outlook message with the figure embedded in the message body, or (b) better copying to the clipboard. Suggestions?

[Can't figure out how to insert a line break, sorry]

[Daniel Shub]

What do you mean by the quality is poor with the Copy Figure option? What type of figure are you dealing with? What is the figure renderer?

[KAE]

The figure looks very pixelated once it is copied to Outlook. This is true for lines and text, and for all options that are in Copy > Figure (bitmap, optimized for PowerPoint, etc).

Answer 1

[Oliver Woodford]

This code will copy a figure to the clipboard as an image:

imclipboard('copy', export_fig());

Both imclipboard and export_fig can be found on the file exchange.

[K E]

Thanks for the suggestion, which has eliminated a Matlab irritant for me. I get nice non-blurry results when copying into Outlook from the following,

imclipboard('copy', export_fig('r', 190, 'format', 'png'));

This should be built into Matlab's Figure > Copy.

[Oliver Woodford]

The options you are using with export_fig are not valid, and do nothing; the result will be identical to the command in my answer. If you want a higher resolution output, use:

imclipboard('copy', export_fig('-r190'));

[K E]

You are right, sorry, I was mixing up export_fig and exportfig.

[owr]

This is great, you just made my life easier as well. I put this function call in a toolbar shortcut preceded by "set(gcf,'Color',[1 1 1])". A white figure background looks nice in Outlook.

Thank you!

[K E]

Here is an explanation of how to make a toolbar shortcut, since I didn't realize it was possible before the prior comment,

http://blogs.mathworks.com/desktop/2007/03/29/shortcuts-for-commonly-used-code/