Techniques for Exporting Graphics Created with Microsoft PowerPoint 97

This file was created by Tim Cullis, and is Copyright (c) INFAR Limited, 1998

It is made available on this site by permission of the author and copyright holder. To reproduce in any other form contact the author: Tim Cullis <tim.cullis@infar.co.uk>

The problem arose out of a project that involved producing sel-study training manuals plus classroom slides. PowerPoint 97 (PPT) is a convenient application for generating simple illustrations and it made sense to create the graphics for the classroom slides within PPT so they could easily be animated.

It didn't make sense to create a separate group of graphics for the manuals (generated in PageMaker), so could PPT act as an artwork repository?

You can generate drawing objects (vector graphics) and text within PPT, plus you can import pictures (bitmapped graphics) and objects generated by other applications. PPT has a wide range of import filters for vector and bitmapped graphics (see Microsoft KnowledgeBase article Q159282 for some limitations) but has poor export facilities. This note documents exporting techniques so that the PPT-generated slides may be used with other applications. Most of the tests were carried out on slides comprising a complex groups of PPT objects (some with vignettes) text, and imported images (some with transparency, others made transparent within PPT).


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Powerpoint Export Guide in PDF format (36kb)

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