Presentation Style Guide

Using Images within Your Presentation

• PowerPoint will display your presentation in slide show mode at 1024x768 resolution. The PC has a native display of 96 DPIs. You should consider these factors, when inserting images into your presentation. If your image file is scanned, or from a digital camera, it is likely to be much larger than the screen resolution. An image size larger than 1024x768 will not translate into a sharper image, when displayed on screen. It will only increase the size of your PowerPoint file and slow down the playback of your presentation. Reduce the image size in an image-editing program prior to inserting the image into your presentation.
• There are many different image file formats available. After you have made sure that your image size is appropriate, you should save your image as a .BMP, .GIF, or .JPG file prior to inserting it into your presentation. Generally the JPEG format provides high quality, small file size and portability to other machines.
• Once you have the images properly sized and saved, choose Insert Picture from file... to put the image onto the slide. Do not copy and paste the image, or drag and drop it into your presentation. Doing that might look fine on your machine, but it may not display properly when you transfer the presentation to another computer, particularly if you are a Mac user who will be presenting from a PC.
• Animated .GIF files - Although these are actually saved within your PowerPoint presentation, you should bring the separate .GIF file with you whenever possible. Microsoft has changed the way they handle the looping of these in recent versions of Office, which on occasion causes them not to play properly in PowerPoint. If you have the original .GIF file with you, you can fix the problem prior to the presentation.

Using Media Clips within Your Presentation

• Be aware that media clips may not be saved as part of your presentation depending on what version you are using. PowerPoint 2010 is the only one that embeds the media clip in the file. For other, the actual video or audio files need to be on the computer you will be presenting from. You will need to supply those files along with your PowerPoint file either when you upload or prior to the presentation.
• Avoid long file names for media clips. There is a limit in PowerPoint on the total length of the path to your media files, and much of it gets used up in pointing to your presentation folder. Though the absolute limit varies based on the presenter's information, movie and sound files with names longer than 20 characters should be renamed prior to inserting them into your presentation. The shorter the file names of your media clips, the better.
• PC users - Using the .WMV file format is the best way to ensure compatibility within PowerPoint on  another PC. While MPEG and AVI formats will generally work too, they use a variety of different codecs that may not be installed on the presentation machine.
• Mac users - Quicktime movies (.MOV file format) do not play directly within a slide in PowerPoint on the PC. You can create a hyperlink to them, which will open them in a separate Quicktime movie player window, and allow you to play them from there. If you are going to be presenting from a PC and you can convert them to .WMV format, they should play properly within slides in PowerPoint. Most MPEG and some AVI codecs will also work on the PC