PowerPoint: Save Slide as Image

Just the other day, someone asked me about setting up a diagram of sorts and said that they weren't too sure about what program to do it in. Not having any software specifically made for that purpose, he was actually pretty surprised when I suggested PowerPoint.

"PowerPoint?" Yes, PowerPoint. With the huge assortment of autoshapes, different fill colours and textures, alignments, transparency settings, and more, PowerPoint is actually a pretty easy-to-use application for building a diagram or other graphic to suit your needs. Often people will do it in Word, but PowerPoint makes it a lot simpler.

"How does it make it simpler?" Well here's the thing. Once you've arranged your image in Word, you're not going to have much fun trying to save that particular part of the page as an image file. You could take a screenshot, but the quality will be horrible. Take PowerPoint though, build your image on a blank slide (using the exact same tools that you would in Word), and then go to the Office Button and choose "Save As" (either click directly on it, or choose 'Other Formats' in the next menu that pops up). Underneath your filename, take a peek at the drop-down menu for "Save as type:". You'll see a wide variety of filetypes to choose from, including graphics formats like GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF. Choose the one you'd like, and watch as your slide is conventiently saved as a graphic that you can easily use in other applications.

The obvious question that remains is "why are you using PowerPoint for graphics anyway, while there are programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Gimp out there?". Personally, I prefer using the Adobe Creative Suite for graphics, but not all of us have access to that software and I like to show that there are some interesting alternate options within the Microsoft Office suite. Sometimes you're in a pinch and you have to do something with the only tools you have available!

Happy image-creating, awesome readers of mine! Thanks for visiting my site today.

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