I vehemently despise PowerPoint. I only mention this because my loathing has probably prevented me from learning how to do some basic things.
I use Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, btw.
I need to build what will mostly be a slide show of photographs with a few text slides thrown in here and there. I always take photos at the highest resolution my camera is capable of, because I often have to use photos for a variety of purposes – from web to commercial printing.
Anywhistle, I HATE inserting hi-res photos into PPT and then having to resize them to fit the slide. And I’ve experienced some funky behavior with PPT presentations containing lots of big honkin’ hi-res photos that I manually resized in PPT.
Is there some way to insert photos in such a way that they fit the slide without manually resizing them?
Alternately, is there something I could do through iPhoto or Automator to batch resize the photos to the appropriate size – and what resolution and/or pixel dimensions would that be for PPT? (I know I can do that in Photo Shop, but I’m trying to save steps.)
Won’t iPhoto ‘export’ selected photos at a given size? At least you can choose vague ‘file quality’ and ‘size’ (large, medium, small); it’ll also do batch changes.
I’m trying to figure out why you feel this is a limiting function of PP. My own policy is to assume a typical projector is going to be 1024x768 (I am normally using my host’s projectors as I travel). If you resize your photos to that, or whatever the native resolution of the projector that you use is, they are easier to work with and will still get the maximum resolution the projector can provide.
When you drop a large photo into PP, the easiest (laziest?) way to resize a very large photo is to have the editing window for the slide displayed at, say, 25% (or as small as you need for the size of photo you are dropping in). That way when you overlay a large photo which you have not previously resized, you can still easily grab the corner and resize it down. Once you have resized the photo to the approximate size by dragging the corners you can change the display of the editing window back to the size your monitor allows and fine-tune the exact finished size of the photo.
I don’t get where any of this is PP’s fault, so to speak. If you overlay a 3k by 5k image on a PP edit window with a displayed size of 100%, of course it’s going to be huge, and unless you have a huge monitor, your editing window is not going to have that large an area so you are going to have to scroll around to get to the corners unless you have shrunk down the displayed size…and that is very irritating indeed.
If I have large graphic files (jpeg, mpeg, etc.) that I want to put into a PP presentation, I will often use hyperlinks and let a media player display the graphic so they are not actually in the PP slides. I just put all of the graphic files into the same folder as the presentation. <shrug> works for me.
I’m just a little surprised that it doesn’t automatically resize the photos for you when you insert them on the slides. The PC version of PowerPoint has done this for at least the past couple of versions.
I like PPT well enough, but I despise what people often do with it. Did you know there is actually an automatic content generator in PPT? Somebody at MS proposed it as a joke, and to their amazement the idea caught on. I am reminded of what H. L. Mencken said about american voters, which I paraphrase: we know what we want, and we deserve to get it, good and hard.
Anyway, I also find that when I insert big pictures into a slide, they cover much more than the slide, and there is a great deal of scrolling and clicking to get the picture to fit on the slide. I don’t know how to get it to do what Hunter Hawk says it does automatically.
I think the most effective way to manage images is to fill the slide with them, and resize the image using some other tool so that its pixel size matches the screen you will be viewing on or the projector you will be viewing through. You can make your own choices about the graphics problems that sometimes accompany resizing that way. You can check what the system is doing by entering the Slide Show mode (or whatever it’s called), then hitting the Print Screen key (often between between F12 and Scroll Lock), which copies the screen into the clipboard, then escape from PPT and paste the image into a graphics program. It will have your screen’s resolution now. Make everything like this, and it will go into PPT without a fight.
Your lazy/easy resize method is what I had been doing. But I’m used to working in graphic design software like InDesign or Xpress where resizing a photo to fit a particular space is a simple keystroke combination.
If you choose a slide layout with a placeholder on it, click the “Insert Picture from File” icon inside the placeholder. PPT will automatically resize the picture you select to fit within that placeholder.
I can’t check how because I’m not at work, and it varies with version number, but there’s a command to compress the images that are stored in the presentation. If you’ve dropped in large, high-resolution images where most of the resolution is just making the file large, you can reduce the file size a lot.
ETA: This is responding to the “funky behavior with PPT presentations containing lots of big honkin’ hi-res photos” bit. Maybe it will help.