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To reduce image size for use in Office documents, without losing substantial image quality, PowerPoint's Save As Picture feature can be a pretty incredible tool. Though it won't provide this kind of results with every picture type, give this a try:

I started with a full-page Adobe Illustrator EPS image that I wanted to use as a PowerPoint slide background. However, when I export it as a bitmap from Illustrator it's several MB in size. When I save it for the Web as a GIF file, the file size is good -- but elements get fuzzy. Instead, here's what I did:

1. Copy the image from its source. In PowerPoint, select Edit, Paste Special and paste the image onto any blank slide as a Device Independent Bitmap or whatever picture file type provides the best quality image for your particular picture. (I like Device Independent Bitmaps when available for image quality and to ensure that fonts contained in my images aren't altered by other applications.)

2. Right-click on the image and select Save As Picture. In the Save As dialog box that appears, select a location and name for your file. You can change the picture file type in that dialog box as well, but note that this feature usually does a good job of selecting the best option for your particular image content.

After you click Save, you can check out your new image file before inserting it as a slide background (or for whatever purpose you're using the new file). In the case of my full-page Illustrator image, the Save As Picture feature saved it as a PNG file (a relatively common Web-compatible image file type) that was a whopping 8.6KB (yup, that's KB!) -- and the image quality when I inserted the new picture file into PowerPoint was indistinguishable from the multi-megabyte bitmap. I just love that little tool!

Posted by Stephanie

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