Collaborating with different versions of PowerPoint can be a challenge.  We have some thoughts about how to do that most easily, and are happy to share them.

First of all, begin with one person doing the layout of your poster. Try our poster templates as a starting point- most people tell us they can lay out a poster in an hour or two using the template. It works best if you resist the urge to use a lot of fonts-  stay with Arial, Times New Roman, and Symbol.  Everybody has them on their computer.

Once the poster is designed, send it around for comments. Make your changes, and now it’s time to show everybody what the poster will actually look like. We find it works best to send them a pdf, if you can make one (requires Adobe Acrobat-$250), or a jpg, if you can’t. You can make a jpg in PowerPoint by going to save-as, and dropping the file type down to jpg.

Saving a jpg in PowerPoint

What’s nice about doing this is that the file will look the same to everyone. It’s not editable, but they can always let you know if they see a typo or whatever.

If your poster is really large, the jpg will be too big for Microsoft Photo Editor to open by clicking on it. Just do insert>picture>from file and put it into PowerPoint and you’ll be able to view it.