I am building another e-course that will cover the 30,000-foot-level reporting methods and have discovered something about graphics that I did not know.  I have always saved graphics as JPG format files for copying and pasting into other presentations.  But I have not been doing the best thing.

In my pre-reading effort, I found a reference to formating graphics.  Use .jpg format for graphics that are pictures or that have limited text.  Use the .png format for graphics that contain a lot of text, numbers or lines.  It turns out that the bit mapped jpg files do not handle the resizing of text and lines very well, but the .png format is able to handle the resizing with very little loss in resolution.

I still paste special into Office documents using the Enhanced Metafile format when taking graphics from other software, such as charts from Minitab, because it allows a resizing without out any visible change in viewability.

The other cool fact I learned deals with very large powerpoint presentations due to a lot of graphics.  I already knew not to just copy and paste into powerpoint from excel and other software because the paste function seemed to paste an entire copy of the original worksheet with every chart.  That is why I always paste special and use the enhanced metafile format.  But there was many times the graphic was too large and I needed to shrink it down or I need to crop the graphic a lot.  I know that this left big files in powerpoint but I did not know what I could do about it.  But now I know.

In a powerpoint presentation, select a graphic and then select the “Picture Tools” menu.   Look for a ”compress pictures” item in the ribbon (I am using ppt 2007).  When you click this button , make sure the “Apply to selected pictures only” check box is not checked.  Then click the options button and check the two option on the top of the new window.  At the bottom, select the screen (150 dpi) option.  Now press OK twice.

This compression will reduce the size of the very large graphics and eliminates all of the pixels that were cropped from graphics.  You will not see a quality change when viewing on a pc or projector.  and your file size will shrink.

I tested these concepts and believe them all to be true.  Good luck.