We have an intern here from Plymouth State for the month of January.  When I explained to her what we did, she said “Oh, it’s awful if you are trying to do a PowerPoint presentation with several people using different versions and platforms.”  Right on.

Here’s an example of what can happen. PowerPoint flows the text down a line, and it collides with the text box below it. We find this happens between different versions, and especially going from Mac to PC or vice versa.

The real question is how to deal with it.  Our suggestion is to make one person responsible for the design of your poster, and have them pass pdf’ or jpg files to the others for review. The whole cross platform thing makes it a real mess to have everybody editing the poster.

PowerPoint text refows

You can make a jpg of your poster by doing file>save as, and then choosing jpg as the “save as type.” When the dialog box pops up, choose “current slide only.” Often, the jpg is too large to double click on it and view with Microsoft Photo Editor, so you can bring it into PowerPoint to view it.

When you get ready to order your poster, we will ask what version and platform you used. That should be what the last person used. Proof carefully! If we see something like this, we’ll fix it, but often what moves are things that are not obvious to us.