I create and show a lot of Powerpoint presentations. Many of them have ended up being pretty large (~50MB). I’ve just learned about compressing the images, which is good and cuts the file size in about half.
Better yet, though, I’ve also just learned that I can easily create a screen-size .pdf file (each page = 1 slide), which I can then project full-screen and click through just like a .ppt. The .pdf file is about 1/4 the size of the compressed .ppt and looks the same (I think).
Any reason not to make this standard practice?
notes:
-I don’t use fancy animations.
-I realize the .pdf is not manipulable. I will also save the original .ppt but it’s handy for the projected version to be smaller.
-Using PowerPoint 2003 and Acrobat 8 Professional.
You might need to keep an eye on the quality of embedded images - they sometimes get recompressed and display very obvious degradation from compression artefacts.
And you won’t have the same kind of control over the presentation (such as seeing speaker notes on the laptop screen while projecting the slides, you won’t be able to press B and have the screen go black, that sort of stuff…
Apart from that, it sounds like it might not be a bad idea - one advantage is that your text will not get reflowed - I’ve had this happen to me when trying to present a powerpoint created with one version on one computer and displayed using another version on another computer - PDF is more immune to such nonsense because it is designed to be largely a static document format.
Converting a PPT to PDF makes loads of sense for distributing copies - everyone either has Acrobat Reader, or they can obtain it for free, but not everyone has Power Point. This also makes it really difficult for anyone to try changing anything.
For presenting, I’d leave it as native Power Point. Unless you’re worried about giving a presentation somewhere and there’s not a PC with PowerPoint, I can’t really think of a good reason to use Acrobat Reader as a presentation tool.
That varies a lot. I teach on a campus and seem to get put in different classrooms each semester. I also do consulting jobs in different offices & go to conferences, etc. The common denominator seems to be terminals with relatively low RAM, which is why I’m interested in small file sizes. (Also I want to park them on the web so students can view & print them as needed.)
I guess because I can get a pretty beefy presentation in about 6MB, and Adobe reader seems to be pretty universal. I never considered the exporting the other ways you mention; what are the advantages?
Speed for one - you can export an entire presentation as one graphic per slide all at once. The disadvantages you’re already prepared to cope with as a PDF but using our graphics export code we obviously have thoroughly tested that there would be no degradation or what have you. Also any OS will render the graphic formats natively - no Acrobat needed. Plus under Tools | Options you can manipulate the type of compression you want when doing graphic export - DPI, etc.
FWIW, I’ve had excellent results exporting OpenOffice’s native slide format to PDF with the built-in export function. I could have tried to save them as Powerpoint files, but MS products often don’t like complicated formatting in OO-created doc/xls/ppt stuff.
I have to say that I consider the idea of converting your slides to .jpg’s or .png’s to be utterly ridiculous, just about the siliest thing I’ve heard this week.
JPG’s cannot handle text, PNG’s cannot handle photos well or efficiently, the presentation will likely be very large and very lossy, it will be impossible to copy and paste text from the slide, and graphic viewing tools likely to be associated with these file extensions might not be designed to easily go to a slide show mode.
I was working as an AV person at a relatively large academic conference here recently (graduate students get drafted into these things when their departments host conferences) and someone higher up had told speakers beforehand that pdf files were a safer format than powerpoint, especially when it came to symbols and scientific notation getting screwed up when switching from Macs to PCs.
Of course, that someone neglected to realize that some of the computers the school found for us appeared to be the only PCs in the Western Hemisphere not to have Adobe Reader on them, and I had to scramble around and eventually find a volunteer from the audience to lend her laptop to the session. But I think that is probably not going to be a problem very often.