Expanded Poster Template

You start putting all your stuff into the poster template you downloaded, and darn, you run out of room. Here’s an easy way to get more space.  The first thing to know is that if you change the size of the page in PowerPoint, it stretches and sqeezes what’s on the page to fit the new page, which is not very helpful. You’ll need to do the following :

Select all by hitting control+A
Cut by hitting control+X (erases everything to the clipboard)
Change your page size to be a little larger
Paste everthing back in using control+V

You can then widen your columns to have more room.  Hint- select all the columns at once by holding down the shift key and clicking on each in turn, and widen them a little bit all together. This keeps them all the same width. Select just the boxes, not the content.

I often add height, since having taller columns gives you more room with the same text box widths.

Remember, the maximum size that PowerPoint allows is 56″ in either dimension. If you are already at 56″ width, adding height is often a good solution. If that is a problem, here’s something that usually works: change your page size to exactly half in each dimension, i.e. a 36×56″ goes to 18×28″. Then, do the cut and paste routine from above to give you an 18×30″ or 18×32″ poster. We’ll print that at 200% to give you 36×60″ or 36×62″.