Make your imported images fill the slide

When you import images, they seldom fill the slide.

You can use two of the Free PPTools StarterSet tools to size images (or anything else) exactly to the current slide in one click. 

Here's how:

First, you’ll need to set a few options.  You only need to do this once:

Click "Set Options for Place Exactly" (the "i" button on the Starter Set toolbar)

Put a check next to "Resize"

If you want to fill the slide with your image even if that distorts the proportions of the image, make sure there's no check next to "Don't distort".  Leave it checked to ensure that the image isn't distorted;  the image will be enlarged to fill the slide as nearly as possible WITHOUT distortion.

Click OK.

Next, use the Pick Up tool to memorize the slide size:

Click just off the slide to ensure that nothing is selected.

Click the Pick Up button (just to the left of the Hammer button).  When nothing is selected, this memorizes the slide's size.

Now import an image or select an image or other shape on the slide and click the Hammer button (the Place Exactly tool) to size the selected shape to fill the slide.

Import another.  Click the hammer.

Import another.  Click the hammer.

And so on ...

The Pick Up and Place Exactly tools are part of the free PPTools Starter Set available at http://www.pptools.com

Lyin's and Scanners and Tears, Oh My

I recently bought a Canon CanoScan LiDE 700f (who makes up these product names???) to replace an older scanner that has no drivers for anything later than Windows XP.

It’s a nice little scanner, comes with decent, if peculiar, software.  Of course, the software for every scanner I’ve owned has earned the Badge of Peculiarity with ease.  Do hardware companies hire Martians to write this stuff?  Hey, I bet that’s where the product names come from too!

But the Canon-supplied software does a nice job and has made it VERY easy to boom through my current project, batch-scanning gazillions of mostly B/W family photos.

Today I decided to have a go with some 35mm slides.  After all, Canon advertises this as a film scanner.  And there began a tale that didn’t end well.

When Canon says “film” it turns out that they mean “strips of unmounted film”.  I learned this from various reviews that I ran across while trying to figure out how, exactly, one scans slides.  The answer:  One Doesn’t.  It just doesn’t DO that.

And while I might have experimented with removing the film chips from the slide mounts in order to scan “film”, the same reviews unanimously complained about the awful results from even unmounted film scanning.

I don’t feel particularly abused, since the scanner does what I bought it for and does it well.  And instead of worrying about where to store the goofy film scanning attachment so I can find it the next time I need it, I can just toss it out.

Net:  Nice scanner for flat documents but if you  want to scan film (mounted or not), keep looking.  You don’t want to wave your credit card over this one.

April 2014 updates solve resolution problems with PowerPoint 2013 image exports!

Good news!

 

The updates for PowerPoint 2013 released in mid April, 2014 solve the poor-quality image export problem I reported earlier.

 

And then some.

 

You can now, with a bit of trickery, export images at over 13,000 pixels wide.

 

Depending on the size of your slide to begin with, that's over 1000 dpi.

 

Watch here for announcements about an upcoming version of PPTools Image Exporter that’ll take advantage of this lovely new feature.