Diagrams in Powerpoint presentation

AnneEast · Post by **AnneEast** » 22 Sep 2012 10:17

I'm preparing a talk for our Family History Society and making a Powerpoint presentation (MS Office Powerpoint 2003).

I want to include extracts of diagrams from FH but am having trouble making them sharp enough. I have tried .jpg and .bmp and even snipping from .pdf but non of them have the clarity of the diagram as shown in FH. Compared to the print and photos I am putting into Powerpoint, the diagrams a all a bit fuzzy. Usable but not very professional looking!

Anyone found the best answer to this please?

Anne

ID:6493

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 22 Sep 2012 10:43

A couple of things, make sure you save them Actual Size and not as display size and try and make sure you keep them at that size in the Powerpoint slide when displayed at the projectors or try embedding a Acrobat object, another option is simply to add a link to a PDF version and click on that during the presentation, which has the advantage that you can scroll around it if you need to.

AnneEast · Post by **AnneEast** » 22 Sep 2012 15:07

Thanks for your thoughts, Jane. I'll try those.

Anne

wulliam · Post by **wulliam** » 22 Sep 2012 16:39

I make the diagrams VERY large and then copy them at display size before pasting them into Microsoft Paint if I want to do some simple work on them.

AnneEast · Post by **AnneEast** » 22 Sep 2012 21:45

Yes, having tried Jane's idea of doing the .bmp as 100% I found the file was not nearly large enough to be sharp.

What I did in the end was to make the diagram (only about 8 people) VERY large on the screem with the zoom. Then made a .bmp file from that. The files were about 6Mb but when diminished onto the slide they are much sharper than before. Still not as sharp as they show in FH though .....so if anyone's got any other thoughts ....?

Anne

Post by **Valkrider** » 23 Sep 2012 10:42

BMP are not ideal as a source format for these type of images.

TIFF will give you the best result BUT they will be huge files.

I suspect that Powerpoint is resizing your images which isn't helping.

Have a look at this article on Microsoft's website for information on sizing your images http://tinyurl.com/d9dkne9

Also click on the image in Powerpoint and set it's properties particularly under the compress option and turn off any compression.

Consider saving as a WMF file these seem to be a good compromise on both size and quality.

AnneEast · Post by **AnneEast** » 23 Sep 2012 13:44

Thanks for that. I've read the article, had a play and saved a diagram in all sorts of file types and sizes. It is only a small diagram with 9 people on, so saved at 100% it fits onto the slide with no dragging to re-size needed. Unfortunately it is very fuzzy.

I have found (so far!!) that the best display is a .bmp file which is huge (7.5Mb) and on inserting it into the slide I have have to drag the corners in until it fits. This does give a reasonably sharp image BUT still not as sharp as it shows on FH.

The .tiff files I tried were smaller than the .bmp file and just as fuzzy as any other the same size. As far as I can tell Powerpoint is not compressing the files and if I untick the compress box it warns me that the quality will suffer!

Perhaps I'm being too fussy!
Anne

PeterR · Post by **PeterR** » 23 Sep 2012 14:54

Have you tried the following?

Use the FH menu option Diagram > Zoom > Set Zoom Level... to e.g. 200%
Then Diagram > Save Diagram As... JPEG File (.jpg)... > Currently Displayed Size
Insert the saved jpeg file into a Powerpoint slide as a picture

I find that this results in a perfectly sharp image. My jpeg file for a small tree (10 boxes) is 187 KB.

AnneEast · Post by **AnneEast** » 23 Sep 2012 17:31

Thank you Peter!

I saved them at 300% zoom and the .jpg files are less than 200kb. The result is about the same clarity as the enormous .bmp images but obviously much better because much smaller file to cope with!

My mistake had been to try and increase the % size of the diagram itself. This doesn't work because then its on more than one page. Strangely just zooming in with the + button didn't seem to have the same effect as setting the % on the menu. Or maybe I'm just imagining that! I've played with so many different versions now I've lost count!

Just in case anyone's interested I also had a problem inserting a sound file into my presentation. After lots of googling I discovered that the file path to the sound file might be too long. (It was buried, with the Powerpoint file, deep in a main folder) I moved the sound file up to the main folder and hey presto the sound worked in the slide show. I had mistakenly thought it would be good to have the file in the same folder as the Powerpoint. But I guess you would all know that!! [smile]

Thanks again for your input folks
Anne

Post by **Nana111** » 13 Dec 2013 04:19

HI there
I am a beginner of Powerpoint.And i found that it is difficult for me to process Powerpoint files.I need to load the powerpoint files .But i have no idea about that.I just want to know that if there is a powerful powerpoint tool which supports to do that directly..And it would be perfect if there is a free trial for new users.Thanks for any suggestions.

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 13 Dec 2013 08:11

Sorry, that is outside the scope of this site, but you might get a response on the identical post you sent to http://www.theiet.org/forums/forum/mess ... adid=43419

Post by **tatewise** » 13 Dec 2013 11:37

Nana,
If you just want a PowerPoint Viewer then it is free from http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download ... aspx?id=13
If you want to edit in PowerPoint then there is a free 1 month trial from http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/try?W ... ice365home

Alternatively, OpenOffice includes Impress which is PowerPoint compatible but totally FREE from https://www.openoffice.org/

Post by **tatewise** » 13 Dec 2013 12:24

Anne,
I got good results with the following.
Either use Diagram > Options and set Scaling to 500% OR use Diagram > Zoom > Set Zoom Level and set 500% or even 800%.
Then use Diagram > Save Diagram As > JPEG File > Currently Displayed Size to create JPG files less than 900KB.

I only have PowerPoint Viewer but I inserted the JPG files into OpenOffice Impress and saved as a PPT file which appeared in PowerPoint Viewer very crisply.

AnneEast · Post by **AnneEast** » 13 Dec 2013 22:35

Thanks Mike. I think we delt with this is 2012! From what I remember my talk went off OK.
Anne

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