Q: How hard can copy-paste be?

A: as overly complicated as anything else that comes out of the Mac BU of Microsoft. Hey Microsoft, stop playing around with multi-touch in Windows 7 and get some engineers working on very basic aspects of your OS and major software. (You'd think they'd have a better business strategy than developing features for 0.01% of their users when features used by 90% of the users don't work properly. But that's what you get when you have a de-facto monopoly on the industry. I mean, people still use Powerpoint instead of Keynote!)

Well, through trial and error, here is what I have discovered. Let's say you have some data. You plot it in excel and format it all nice and pretty. Then you copy-paste it into Powerpoint for your talk at an upcoming conference. Uh-oh, it doesn't work! Turns out, you need to go back, and save that spreadsheet in .xls format (previous version format). Then you've got to copy and paste-special as a Microsoft Excel Chart Object. Now your format is screwed and your chart looks like shit. No worries, double-click it, tell it to convert, wait a ridiculously long 5 seconds, and now you can edit your chart directly in Powerpoint.

To review:
1) you can't copy and paste from .xlsx to .pptx format directly.
2) when copy and pasting from .xls to .pptx, you need to paste-special (Microsoft Excel Chart Object)
3) the pasted chart needs to be converted before you can format it and for it not to look like crap

I had similar problems copy-pasting from pdf. Solution? save as png and then paste it in.