Powerpoint 2004 vs. Powerpoint v.X-2004 is SLOOOOOOOOOOW1

[dfritzin]

Hi,

Has anyone else noticed this problem? It was brought to my attention
recently when I borrowed a notebook to give a presentation that had
Office vX on it. My problem is that in Powerpoint 2004, many
transitions are very slow, espceially if the next slide has graphics in
it. For example, I have prepared a rather long Powerpoint slideshow on
my office Mac, a 1st generation PM G5/2.0 Gig, with 1 Gig of RAM,
running 10.4.5. When using the slide show mode on this machine, I have
to wait for several seconds for some of the slides to show up on the
screen. On my iMac G5 (RevB, 20"/2.0Gig with 1 Gig RAM), the situation
is similar. If I try to run the same show on my old iBook G3/700/256,
it is painfully slow. However, a similar presentation ran acceptably
fast on the iBook when run on Powerpoint vX.

What really brought this to my attention again is that when I borrowed
the Powerbook G4 (867 MHz, 640 MB RAM), which is running 10.3.9 and
Office vX, my slideshow ran faster on the Powerbook than on my
PowerMac, even though the PowerMac is a much more powerful machine?
What is going on with PowerPoint?

As a point of information, the presentation was originally created in
PowerPoint v.X, but has been highly modified in PowerPoint 2004. To get
it to run faster, I have changed graphs to jpg files (they were
originally just pasted in from Excel), and have made all other graphics
jpeg files, which helped quite a bit. However, graphics-rich slides
still hesitate for several seconds before coming on the screen.

One more issue, what is it with Microsoft applications and pdf files.
I have created pdf files that display excellently in both Adobe Acrobat
and Preview. However, when I put them into any Office application, they
show up as very low resolution graphics. What is going on?

Thanks for reading my rant. Any help would be appreciated. Also, is
Microsoft looking to improve this on the next version of Office?

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

PPT 2004 can be slower than v.X, but if you have the latest updates
installed it should not be that much slower. I think in most cases a G5
with a good graphics card should not feel slower.

I'd spend some time doing basic troubleshooting. Repair permissions and
run DiskWarrior. If you know how to examine memory with Apple's Activity
Monitor, have a look and see how much memory is being used.

For most presentations a low resolution graphic will display as nice as
a high resolution. If you have 600 dpi TIFFS turn them into 96 dpi JPEGS
and things should move a lot faster.

PDF files only display a poster of the first page of the document. You
don't see the entire file.

-Jim

 

[googmeister]

Hi,

Has anyone else noticed this problem? It was brought to my attention
recently when I borrowed a notebook to give a presentation that had
Office vX on it. My problem is that in Powerpoint 2004, many
transitions are very slow, espceially if the next slide has graphics in
it. For example, I have prepared a rather long Powerpoint slideshow on
my office Mac, a 1st generation PM G5/2.0 Gig, with 1 Gig of RAM,
running 10.4.5. When using the slide show mode on this machine, I have
to wait for several seconds for some of the slides to show up on the
screen. On my iMac G5 (RevB, 20"/2.0Gig with 1 Gig RAM), the situation
is similar. If I try to run the same show on my old iBook G3/700/256,
it is painfully slow. However, a similar presentation ran acceptably
fast on the iBook when run on Powerpoint vX.

Hi. Dave. Yes, lots of us have experienced the same performance
problem.
Transitions and saving files can be especially slow and painful. It's
ok on a
G5 with a fast graphics display, but not most of us use laptops to give
presentations.

One more issue, what is it with Microsoft applications and pdf files.
I have created pdf files that display excellently in both Adobe Acrobat
and Preview. However, when I put them into any Office application, they
show up as very low resolution graphics. What is going on?

Yes, the rest of the world moved to pdf/eps/ai for vector graphics,
but ppt provides very poor support for these standardized formats.
I end up converting to a larger png, import into ppt, then resize
to a smaller picture (so that it both displays and prints well).

Thanks for reading my rant. Any help would be appreciated. Also, is
Microsoft looking to improve this on the next version of Office?

Many of us hope so.

My pet peave is the amount of time it takes ppt to save
a 1MB .ppt - sometimes it's 20 seconds on my G5 (and over a minute
on my G4). Nobody has been able to solve this problem either. Here's
hoping it will all be fixed in the next update!

 

[Dave Fritzinger]

Hi,

PPT 2004 can be slower than v.X, but if you have the latest updates
installed it should not be that much slower. I think in most cases a G5
with a good graphics card should not feel slower.

This is not a "bit slower", but more like massively slower. To give you
an idea, I had a presentation that ran fine on a iBook G3 (with only
256 MB RAM). The same presentation, when run on a PM G5 (dual 2.0,
revA, 1 Gig, OSX.4, with an ATI 9600 graphics card) was painfully slow.
Sometimes it would take over 10 sec for the next slide to appear. I
have been able to alleviate some of this by changing the format of the
graphic elements (I had been pasting graphs from Excel into the slides.
Now I save as Pict, and use Canvas to save as JPG, since the Excel save
a JPG feature gives graphs with very low resolution). Still,
graphics-rich slides can take several seconds to appear.

I'd spend some time doing basic troubleshooting. Repair permissions and
run DiskWarrior. If you know how to examine memory with Apple's Activity
Monitor, have a look and see how much memory is being used.

For most presentations a low resolution graphic will display as nice as
a high resolution. If you have 600 dpi TIFFS turn them into 96 dpi JPEGS
and things should move a lot faster.

PDF files only display a poster of the first page of the document. You
don't see the entire file.

I think this is an error on the part of Microsoft, since it is so easy
to save graphics as PDF files on a Mac. Most of the time when I try to
display PDF files in Word or powerpoint, it is of an Excel graph, or a
picture from Canvas or Photoshop, meaning it is a single graphic
element. In the two Microsoft applications, the pdf files are displayed
in very low resolution, so as to be totally useless for presentations.

I should say that I am hoping to replace my iBook with a MacBook Pro
sometime in the near future. I am worried that Powerpoint, running
under Rosetta, will be pretty useless on this machine, and am strongly
considering trying Keynote instead.

Thanks for your help, Jim.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Dave,

There are so many ways of getting graphs into PowerPoint I don't know
where to begin.

I would think you would like to be able to take advantage of
PowerPoint's ability to animate various portions of a graph. In that
case PDF or any sort of picture format is a bad choice.

One of these days I have to make a full tutorial on the various ways of
dealing with graphs and PowerPoint.

Does it make a difference to you if the graphs are linked to the source
data? Are you planning to distribute the presentation files or just use
them on one computer?

-Jim

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Following up...

Although I don't have a complete tutorial about graphs and PowerPoint,
here's something that might be of interest:
http://www.agentjim.com/MVP/linkgraph.htm

 

[Dave Fritzinger]

Hi Dave,

There are so many ways of getting graphs into PowerPoint I don't know
where to begin.

I would think you would like to be able to take advantage of
PowerPoint's ability to animate various portions of a graph. In that
case PDF or any sort of picture format is a bad choice.

One of these days I have to make a full tutorial on the various ways of
dealing with graphs and PowerPoint.

Does it make a difference to you if the graphs are linked to the source
data? Are you planning to distribute the presentation files or just use
them on one computer?

Hi, Jim,

Thanks for getting back to me. Perhaps I should explain my situation.
My presentations are of scientific data, and don't really need to be
fancy. The audience is other scientists, so animated graphs would
probably not impress them.

I like to take my graphs out of Excel because I use the program to
analyze my data, and Excel offers enough options for different kinds of
graphs to allow me to display my data in a meaningful way. Therefore,
pictures of the graphs are perfectly OK with me, and I don't really
want to go have to use the MS Graph program. In addition, I sometimes
show other graphics in my slides, which are usually prepared using a
combination of PhotoShop and Canvas v.X. Since some of these graphics
are based on Tiff files, the file size can be quite large, though I can
alleviate that somewhat by saving the pictures as either jpegs or pdf
file (which is why it would be nice to be able to insert high
resolution pdf files in MS programs when it is so easy to save files as
pdfs in OSX). I haven't had a chance to look over the web site you
directed me to, so perhaps I will have other comments when I do.

Anyway, I am hopeful that Microsoft will be able to do something to
speed up PowerPoint in the next upgrade. I really like some of the new
features, so I don't want to go back to v.X, but the slow transitions
are a real problem with me.

Thanks,

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Dave,

You don't have to use MS Graph, but you could.

There are lots of advantages to not using pictures of graphs. Pictures
consume lots of memory, can be slow to load (especially TIFF format
which is primarily for archive purposes), and simply won't look as good
as having the actual graphs in your PowerPoint slides.

That being said, in Excel you can always save a graph that is on a
worksheet simply by control-clicking on it and save it as a picture.
This save-as option is not available if the graph is the entire sheet,
so you would use the chart menu to change the location of the graph to a
worksheet if you have it on a chart sheet. Pictures saved as JPEGs in
this method will default at 72dpi - a nice resolution for putting into
PowerPoint presentations. Mac PowerPoint offers ways to save graphs at
higher resolution for publication purposes if need be. Windows Office
does not.

Another approach is in Excel put your graph on a chart worksheet (Chart
menu > Location "as new sheet"). Save the workbook. Then use Edit > Move
or Copy Sheet and copy (or move) the graph to New Workbook. Save the new
workbook as Excel workbook with a new name. Then with that same new
workbook use File > Save As and choose format as Excel 4.0 chart. This
will create a file with a .xlc extension. Then switch to PowerPoint. On
a slide that you want the graph use the Insert menu and choose Object.
In the dialog box click the button From File, then choose the .xlc file
you made. That's one way to bring the graph in and keep the formatting.

Another approach is to make the graph in PowerPoint using Insert >
Object > Microsoft Excel Chart. You can copy an existing excel graph
and paste it into this one. You can preserve formatting by using user
defined chart types.

Still another approach is to use Microsoft Graph, which is not at all
different from Excel graph except that it doesn't do calculations. You
can do it from the Insert > Object menu. You can copy your data from
Excel and paste it into Microsoft Grpah's spreadsheet. You can also do
Microsoft Graph objects using the slide formats on the formatting palette.

Each method I described (way to briefly) above behaves differently and
offers different options. You will be given choices in some cases about
linking data from the Excel source. If the source won't be available,
then don't link.

-Jim

 

[Antti Ussa]

That being said, in Excel you can always save a graph that is on a
worksheet simply by control-clicking on it and save it as a picture.
This save-as option is not available if the graph is the entire sheet,
so you would use the chart menu to change the location of the graph to a
worksheet if you have it on a chart sheet. Pictures saved as JPEGs in
this method will default at 72dpi - a nice resolution for putting into
PowerPoint presentations. Mac PowerPoint offers ways to save graphs at
higher resolution for publication purposes if need be. Windows Office
does not.

How is that accomplished? Mine only offers different save-as-types: png,
gif, jpg and bmp. Nothing about resolution. Am I missing something?

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

How is that accomplished? Mine only offers different save-as-types: png,
gif, jpg and bmp. Nothing about resolution. Am I missing something?

Click the Options button on the Save As dialog box.

This applies to the resolution of entire slides saved as images; I'm not sure
about saving individual graphs as images.


================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Anetti,

Here are two approaches to saving pictures of graphs within PowerPoint.

* Right-Click on a graph and choose one of the save-as options
* Use File > Save As and choose one of the picture types

PowerPoint has preferences that affect the screen resolution of these
saves. You will find these settings in PowerPoint > Preferences or in
the Options button of the File > Save As dialog box.

The settings are not very precise, and do not work as advertised. This
is a known issue. You will need to verify the actual DPI of the result
using a graphic editor such as PhotoShop or GraphicConverter.

You can adjust the setting to as high as you like, but the maximum DPI
you will get depends upon the file type you choose to save as and also
on the current moon phase. Here's the maximum DPI that I was able to
get when saving based on file type:

TIFF 72dpi
JPEG 72dpi
PICT 1200dpi
PNG 300dpi
BMP 72dpi
GIF 72dpi

When I want the very best resolution I stretch the graph so that it is
as large as a full screen then choose the File > Save As > and use
either PNG or PICT. The result is usually excellent. For web stuff JPEG
is also very nice.

-Jim

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hi Anetti,

Here are two approaches to saving pictures of graphs within PowerPoint.

* Right-Click on a graph and choose one of the save-as options
* Use File > Save As and choose one of the picture types

PowerPoint has preferences that affect the screen resolution of these
saves. You will find these settings in PowerPoint > Preferences or in
the Options button of the File > Save As dialog box.

The settings are not very precise, and do not work as advertised. This
is a known issue. You will need to verify the actual DPI of the result
using a graphic editor such as PhotoShop or GraphicConverter.

You can adjust the setting to as high as you like, but the maximum DPI
you will get depends upon the file type you choose to save as and also
on the current moon phase. Here's the maximum DPI that I was able to
get when saving based on file type:

TIFF 72dpi
JPEG 72dpi
PICT 1200dpi
PNG 300dpi
BMP 72dpi
GIF 72dpi

Are those real DPIs or Photoshop (aka Fantasyland) DPIs?

Given the same size original graphic, are the sizes of the files in pixels the
same? If so, Photoshop's messing with your head.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Sheesh! PhotoShop - big bucks. I use GraphicConverter - almost as good
and much less expensive.

I told PowerPoint to save a slide at 300 dpi. PPT says it will save it
at 3000x2250 pixels at that setting.

The resulting slide in PNG format was 2999 x 2249 pixels (pretty close!)
according to GraphicConverter.

-Jim

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Sheesh! PhotoShop - big bucks. I use GraphicConverter - almost as good
and much less expensive.

I told PowerPoint to save a slide at 300 dpi. PPT says it will save it
at 3000x2250 pixels at that setting.

The resulting slide in PNG format was 2999 x 2249 pixels (pretty close!)
according to GraphicConverter.

Probably right on target. Some of these programs start counting at zero
instead of one. That's what comes of letting programmers write programs,
dontcha know.

OK, so at the same settings, how many pixies do you get when you export TIF or
JPG?

-Jim

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi again,

Slide saved as TIFF 72 dpi 1000x750 pixels
Slide saved as JPEG 72 dpi 2999x2249 pixels

Graph Object saved as JPEG 72 dpi 483x320 pixels
Graph Object asave as TIFF not an available choice

-Jim

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Hi again,

Slide saved as TIFF 72 dpi 1000x750 pixels
Slide saved as JPEG 72 dpi 2999x2249 pixels

No kidding? Wow. Can you say "Buggy"? Sure you can. Say it with me.

Buggy.

BuggyBuggyBuggyBuggyBuggyBuggyBuggyBuggyBuggyBuggy.

Graph Object saved as JPEG 72 dpi 483x320 pixels
Graph Object asave as TIFF not an available choice

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Well, I should apologize, because it's not really a bug.

When saving an entire slide the object is the size of the slide (and the
graph if you've stretched it to fit the slide). The save as object was
before I stretched the graph to fit the slide. So if I had stretched the
graph to fit, then it probably would have been the same size.

-Jim

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Well, I should apologize, because it's not really a bug.

When saving an entire slide the object is the size of the slide (and the
graph if you've stretched it to fit the slide). The save as object was
before I stretched the graph to fit the slide. So if I had stretched the
graph to fit, then it probably would have been the same size.

That part I sort of assumed. It was this bit:

Slide saved as TIFF 72 dpi 1000x750 pixels
Slide saved as JPEG 72 dpi 2999x2249 pixels

that set me off.

That's just ... oh, what is the mot juste ... ah. I have it. Wrong.

================================================
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
================================================

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

That gets us into NDA land. Let's just say they know and leave it at that.

-Jim