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I looked for the TECHWR-L archives about ways to lock/protect MS Powerpoint
(PPT) files.
There were several suggestions.
The usual suggestion has been to distill it as a PDF file. However, this is
not practical for PPT files which have the same graphic (such as a company
graphic) that are in the master template and which appear on all slides.
This also occurs for graphics that have been placed in headers and footers
in MS Word. Distiller repeats the creation of the graphic for each page, and
so if your graphic takes a lot of space, it is repeated the number of times
it appears on slides/pages.
Result: my 7 Mb PPT file distilled into a 17 Mb PDF file which was certainly
too big to send to a client.
Susan Gallagher <sgallagher -at- EXPERSOFT -dot- COM> (on 27 Jan 1999) suggested
saving as a Windows metafile (.wmf) in PPT. Then open MS Word , Insert >
Picture > From File.
The problem I have with this proposed solution is that the individual wmf
image files are still very large. Just the wmf files from the first 2 slides
from my 7 Mb PPT presentation import into Word with a total file size of 2.7
Mb. If I need to import 50 slides as wmf files, the final Word Doc file size
will be larger than the distilled PDF file that I first created.
I have found another workable solution to keep the file size down and to
protect the file.
The PPT file can be saved as JPG (choose to save either as individual slides
or convert the entire ppt file: If you choose the entire ppt file, it will
save all of your individual slide jpg files into a new directory).
Open MS Word
(Note: it is good at this point to change the page format to Landscape to
imitate the presentation format of Powerpoint).
Use Insert > Picture > From File for each of your converted slides.
Use Tools > Protect the Document to lock the file with a password.
The first 10 of my 50 ppt slides only took up 1.2 Mb of space (zipping the
resulting Word file compresses by an additional 10-15%), so this is a very
workable solution for keeping the file size similar to the original PPT file
size.
When sending the Word file to recipients, advise them to select View > Zoom
> Full Page.
Best,
Jeff Allen
Mycom France
jeff -dot- allen -at- mycom-int -dot- fr
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