Thursday, June 24, 2010

Technical Question on Making Hi Res JPG Maps from PowerPoint

PowerPoint has a lot of great uses that a lot of people just don't know about. One of them is outputing jpg files that can be used for print or on your website, kind of a poor mans version of Adobe Illustrator.

We had this great question from Carlie on how to make a hi res jpg file from PowerPoint

Question:
When saving as a jpeg, is there a way to edit the resolution? It automatically saves to 96dpi. I'd like to save as 300dpi

Answer: 
Hi, Carlie, thank you for your question. I am assuming you are working out of PowerPoint. Making a jpg file is an easy save as option in the Save As pull down menu under the File menu. Instead of saving the PowerPoint file as a slide deck, just choose jpg.. If you are going to the web then as it saves it is fine, the resolution is 96 dpi, if you are going to print then you might want it higher.

Here is a way to do that. Set up a larger PowerPoint slide, maybe 20" x 20", in document setup, copy the map into it, (this is important, otherwise it gets distorted, don't enlarge the slide with the map in place, copy it onto the new slide), group it, enlarge it and then make the jpg. Then in Photoshop or some other photo editing program you can reduce it down to a smaller size and the resolution will go up proportionally.  You can also just resize the jpg in your layout program and the resolution goes up.

So 9 inches at 100dpi, becomes 300dpi at 2.25, a very easy way to make a hi res jpg file.

We also have a video on this

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