I wanted to save a PowerPoint presentation about a recent Northwest Passage cruise to a series of HD-resolution (1920×1080) JPEGs for direct display from a USB stick to a TV.
PowerPoint will let you do this, but only at 1280×720(!) resolution.
After a brief search, I found an official Microsoft document on this subject: “How to change the export resolution of a PowerPoint slide”.
Instead of adding a dialog box to prompt the user for the desired resolution, Microsoft took the trouble to advertise a method of doing this by editing the Windows registry, complete with cautions about how “serious problems might occur” if you make any mistakes while editing said registry.
It is kind of awe-inspiring.
(How does one accomplish this goal? The advertised procedure does work and a DPI resolution of 144 results in 1920×1080 pixel JPEGs. The current version of PowerPoint included with Office 365 is 16.0. See this video tutorial if you want a little more handholding.)
I think you know the answer, but here is mine.
There are reasons why software companies and even hardware companies do this: resource requirement is one of them.
In theory, there is no reason for PP to have any limit on the size of an image you attach to it. But if there wasn’t one, then it is very hard to prevent crashes, lockups or odd behaviors when someone attempts to attach an image that far exceeds available resources. Because of this some sort of agreed upon limit is set and a “workaround” is provided to meet special cases like in your case.
Yes, a dialog box would have been lot better, but the work work to do so is balanced with the hard-coded limit and publication of the “workaround”. Beside, there are many more such hard-coded limits, and it just happens to be that you run into one of them, should all have a dialog box to change them?
George: there is no limit on the size of the images that can go into a PPT. This is about rendering output JPEGs. PowerPoint plainly can render HD or 4K resolution because it does that all day every day to the screen of whatever computer is running PowerPoint.
Mac version has an option in the dialog box to set the output resolution . . . or export a movie.
We need Microsoft so that more people in Uttar Pradesh can move to Seattle.
The American founders of Microsoft sold out their stakes years ago. The current foreign-born management has incorporated a rent-seeking business model that is dependant on overly broad copyright and patent regimes masquerading as the charade of ‘intellectual property’.
Writing buggy crappy software beats the hell out of running crappy motels as a way to get into America.
I hereby acknowledge my thought crime. We need more chinese-style surveillance and control of the Internet to keep dangerous words like mine off of it. I apologize for lessening this blog’s google-juice by typing in hate speech. The heads of Google and Microsoft, more American than me in all things, whose boots I am not fit to lick, does not deserve to suffer such indignities from deplorable people like myself.
But seriously… can anyone name a single useful feature since Win95? Search has been broken since Win98. Seriously, try using windoze expolorer to search for a file name – 50% chance it will sometimes work. Meanwhile, it indexes all your drives and send keywords back to the mothership.
A simpler solution may be to use a printer driver that can save to JPEG directly, or to save to PDF and convert the pages to JPEG.