Just as I thought I had nailed down all the reasons why one should not hand out their PowerPoint slide deck to their audience, I find another good reason. Dave Paradi, author of “The Visual Slide Revolution” runs a blog on PowerPoint. Dave operates out of Mississauga, Ontario in Canada. His recent post talks about cropping pictures and how the cropped part of the image can be regenerated if the PPT compression feature is not performed on the picture.
Often photos of equipment or processes operating in the field can add real value to a presentation and credibility to your product. However there exists additional information in the image that could reveal the location, client or other sensitive data that you may not want to make public at that time. Cropping is a great image editing tool that can eliminate any sensitive information however if the image has not been compressed in PowerPoint, the full image can be revealed along with that sensitive information.
Once again, preparing a proper hand-out is key. Not only can you leave a document that supports your presentation with all the detailed data, it will provide the full story for someone who could not make it to your presentation themselves. Someone like the . . . the key decision maker?
The next blog post will talk about what options for hand-outs are available to you when you do that next presentation.
Hang in there, this is going to be a journey.
Tags: Add new tag, audience, Handouts, non-linear Presentation, PowerPoint Purpose, presentations
Tags: Add new tag, audience, Handouts, non-linear Presentation, PowerPoint Purpose, presentations
March 11th, 2009 at 10:23 am
Ah the dreaded image cropping within the software, that’s why I always advocate that images be cropped in an external photo editing program prior to inserting in a Word or PPT document. There are several excellent FREEWARE programs to crop images and save them in a variety of formats.
GIMP - An amazing FREE photo editing software that can rival Photoshop
XNView - an image browser, but with the ability to crop and resize images.
MS Paint - In a pinch, you can simply do a screenshot using CTRL PRINT SCREEN and then paste that into Paint and using the selection tool select the part of the image you would like and copy it, then paste it back into Paint as a new image and then save it off as a new image to then incorporate into your PPT. It may sound a bit long to do, but once you’ve done it a few times it becomes quite simple and straightforward. Inserting smaller images also makes them load faster and can make your PPT smaller in size.
March 11th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Thanks for the suggestions Stefano. I will check our GIMP since I often need a bit more power in image editing and you can’t beat the price.
March 18th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Hi MJ
Gimp is a great tool - even better is Photoshop. All new P&S digital cameras come with Photoshop Elements (PS Elements) which is a very powerful image editing tool
March 23rd, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Hi MJ and Richard,
Just a little point and sorry for being such a stickler, but Photoshop elements is a very watered-down version of Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop is the defacto standard in photo retouching and editing and you are right Richard, it’s a powerhouse, but it comes with a hefty price (~$700 USD). Photoshop elements does a few things, like cropping and red-eye reduction and stuff like that, but lacks many of the more advanced features of it’s more able namesake. GIMP however, is a power house and if you choose to download the Photoshop clone version of GIMP called GIMPShop (You can Google it) you have a FREE photo editing program to rival Photoshop with all the menu features in the same place as Photoshop and the same overall ‘feel’ as PS. Just my $0.02 worth. I’m a big believer in using Open Source “FREE” software as opposed to spending a fortune for software and I’m very much against copying software so using Open Source is the best way to go in my opinion.
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Thanks Stefano and Richard for your input. I am going to try out Gimpshop and give it a run.
Thanks for following!
September 19th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Thanks for this valuable post. I love gimp.
December 12th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Really nice post, Thanks again for a nice site.
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