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kman42 · Sep 21, 2005, 12:08 AM

My wife is teaching a course and she is using powerpoint for her lectures. She is using Powerpoint 2004 to make her presentations, but she has to burn them to CD and run them on a PC at the university. I'm not sure what version of PP they have. She had some trouble last week with some of the graphics not showing up (she can't remember what the error was). I remember PP having issues with including graphics and movies when presentations are saved, but I can't seem to figure it out. It's been a long time since I've used PP (I've converted to Keynote), but I always see people who forget to put their movies on their CDs, so they aren't included in the presentations.

I tried looking through the help files and came across the PP Package format which says it bundles all the graphics files and movie files into a folder. I decided to make some test files to try to figure things out, but I'm stuck. I have made lots of test presentations with various graphics and movies copied or dragged in and saved the files as either Presentations or Packages and they always seem to be the same, except that packages are saved in a folder. I would have thought that the Packages format would copy the graphics and movies to the folder, but it appears to just be saving the graphics and movies inside the presentation. The only file ever saved in the folder is the presentation itself. I can't find anything in the preferences about saving linked files inside the presentation which, if I recall correctly, was an option in older versions of PP.

Can someone enlighten me on this? When are graphics/movies just linked and when are they actually put inside the PP file? When is it necessary to save as a Package?

thanks,
kman

philm · Sep 21, 2005, 06:00 AM

There was quite a bit of discussion of this here. Intriguingly, in post 12 (or thereabouts), Tsilou B. mentions a program he has written for Powerpoint to convert all the images into PNGs which should then work in Windows. I downloaded it at the time as I thought this would be exceptionally useful. I have not used it yet, however. See if you can download it and perhaps your wife could try it out.

I think something like this program is what you need rather than packages. I thought packages only gathered external movie files into one folder.

kman42 · Sep 21, 2005, 09:54 AM

Thanks for the link. I'll read up.

I think your assessment of packages is correct, but my question is: when are files linked and when are they embedded? After copy/paste or drag/drop they always seem to be embedded.

kman

philm · Sep 21, 2005, 02:12 PM

I think all files are embedded except movie files which are always linked. Pictures/images can only be embedded and movies can only be linked - there is no choice. Audio clips - not sure.

larkost · Sep 21, 2005, 06:13 PM

The Mac version of Office takes great advantage of the QuickTime library, so can view a vast range of graphics and video formats. The Windows versions of Office only handle QuickTime 2 media, and a raft of WindowsMedia formats. So if you have things like PICT images, or QuickTime videos, or EPS's, etc... they will be viewable on the Mac, but not on the PC.

Converting to PNG or JPEG at a high enough resolution will work for presentations, but unless you go really high will not look as good on paper.

Shades of Gray · Sep 23, 2005, 01:06 PM

Originally Posted by philm

Pictures/images can only be embedded and movies can only be linked - there is no choice. Audio clips - not sure.

Not sure i understand your point. I wrote some VBA code that takes an Excel range or chart and pastes a linked picture of it into PowerPoint. Is that not linked files, rather than embedded?

philm · Sep 23, 2005, 06:24 PM

Originally Posted by Shades of Gray

Not sure i understand your point. I wrote some VBA code that takes an Excel range or chart and pastes a linked picture of it into PowerPoint. Is that not linked files, rather than embedded?

Hmm, yes, I am not sure my comment was correct and later postings reminded me of Powerpoint's linked files option. Movies are always referenced externally to the Powerpoint file. Images can be 'embedded' (by which I mean there is no reference to an external file so it can be moved or deleted or whatever) or in fact linked (where a change in the linked file will cause a change in the Powerpoint presentation).