Playing tricks with Powerpoint

Powerpoint isn't just slide presentation and authoring software. It has many more potential uses:

A flexible diagramming tool

You want a nice neat diagram, but you haven't got a package like Visio? No problem, just draw it in Powerpoint instead. No, it hasn't got some of the clever tools like linking objects together with arrows or lines. But it's quite a good tool, with an interface you're already familiar with.

I want to put that diagram in another program, Word or Blogger for example

Powerpoint has a hidden surprise. Draw a diagram or two in a Powerpoint presentation. Drop in the odd photo, a few shapes and so on. Then save the presentation.

But wait - have you really LOOKED at the choice of "save" formats? There are more than twenty, depending what version of Powerpoint you're using. The really interesting ones are graphics formats - GIF, JPG, PNG, TIFF and BMP.

Click Save As and select your favourite graphic format, then Powerpoint asks "Do you want to export every slide in the presentation or only the current slide". If you select "Every slide" Powerpoint produces one graphic per slide, inside a folder. Otherwise you just get one graphic file.

Then you can import the graphic file into Word (Insert - Picture...) or into another application, maybe Movie Maker. But I'll tell you about that another day.

So how do you control the size (resolution) of the exported graphic? Simple - change the page size of the Powerpoint presentation, using Design - Page Setup.

I only wanted to convert a Clip Art image into a GIF

Easy if you know how, and if you've got a graphics editor like Paint.Net (free download)

Insert - Clip Art to get the image into Powerpoint (or Word). Select the image, and Copy.

Paste it into Paint.Net (Edit - Paste into New Image) and save it to your desired format. Very handy for using in blog posts!

(And yes, this blog post was illustrated using the techniques I've described above)