Thursday, May 25, 2006

Always send handouts in PDF from PowerPoint or Word

When you are creating handouts from your PowerPoint slides, creating those handouts in PDF format is a great idea. I had a recent experience where I had carefully created a handout in Word based on my slides and sent it to the client to be printed. Lo and behold, I show up and my fancy formatting was gone and it looked plain as could be. They had reformatted it for some reason. If you use handouts that are printouts of your slides, you can run into even more trouble as they may not print the slides the way you want them to look, despite your best efforts at setting up a handout master and giving detailed instructions. The solution - use Adobe's Acrobat PDF format instead. With a PDF document, anyone can print it and it will look exactly the way you designed it to look. You can create a PDF document in a number of ways: using Adobe's Acrobat program (you must purchase this, it is not the free Reader program you have already on your computer), use a free PDF program, use the web based service from Adobe or some office type programs will create a PDF as an option (sorry, MS Office is not there yet). The best part - they can't change what you created, so you will be assured that what you sent will be what your audience sees.

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