You can copy and paste any graph into another software program. Simply select Copy Picture from the Edit menu (or use control-C for PC or Cmd-C for Mac) when the graph window is foremost on your screen. Switch to the other application, and select Edit > Paste or (control-V PC or Cmd-V Mac). The graphs are exported as bitmaps. Bitmaps are most quickly drawn by other programs and the representation is quite good. However, bitmaps cannot be resized without risking significant distortion to things like axis labels, text, etc. If you want to export high-quality vector art go to File menu and choose Export To App, then choose a file format. The .svg and .emf are both ungroupable, scalable file formats (.emf geared towards Microsoft products). File format defaults for export can easily be set in your File Format Preferences. Regardless of the format, the plot itself will remain fixed at screen resolution, i.e. you won't be able get better resolution than what you see in FlowJo for univariate or bivariate plots, but lines, text, etc. will scale.
At right is the Edit menu in the Graph Window.
Other copy options include:
Copy Histogram as Text will copy Scale values and Channel values to the clipboard. Scale values are calculated from the raw cytometry data. Similar values are collected into bins, making calculations faster and allow for better interpretation. Channel numbers are the raw values sent from the cytometer for each event. You might wish to export the text version of a histogram so that you can perform specialized analyses, such as DNA analysis (cell-cycle fitting), etc. When you paste into a spreadsheet, two columns will be created. The first one has the scale or channel numbers for the histogram (at whatever resolution the data was collected); the second has the event counts for each channel. If a gate was applied to view the graph, then the exported data will reflect only the gated events.
Copy Gate allows you to then paste the gate back into the same or another graph. It will also send the XML description of the gate to the clipboard.
Copy to Layout Editor will open the Layout Editor and place the plot and its associated annotation on the layout canvas.
For more information, see the Web page about exporting raw data and the section on the kinetics platform.
