PowerPoint 2007 makes pictures blurry, loses GIF animation

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Problem

When you save presentations in PowerPoint 2007 then open them in PowerPoint 2007 or earlier versions, you notice that the pictures in your presentation are blurry or less sharp than when you first inserted them.

Solution

PowerPoint 2007 has an option to automatically compress images when you save the presentation. That's a good thing.

This option is turned on by default. In my opinion, that's a very bad decision. Programs should never, ever throw away a user's data without asking for permission first, but that's exactly what PowerPoint is doing here.

Worse, when PowerPoint compresses an animated GIF, the animations are lost.

Even worse, it's hard to find the dialog box where you can turn this "feature" off.

And to make things worse yet, turning compression off applies only to the current presentation.

To turn compression off (but only for the current presentation):

• Choose File, Save As.
• In the Save As dialog box click Tools.
• Choose Compress Pictures.
• On the Compress Pictures dialog box, click Options.
• On the Compression Settings dialog box that appears, remove the check next to "Automatically perform basic compression on save".
• Optionally remove the check next to "Delete cropped areas of pictures".
• Click OK to dismiss the Compression Settings dialog box.
• Click OK to dismiss the Compress Pictures dialog box.
• Back in the Save As dialog box, you can either go ahead and save or cancel. The compression options you just set will be preserved either way.

If you've already inserted any pictures, be sure to do this BEFORE you save your presentation. Otherwise it'll be too late. Your pictures will be compressed when you saved.

A more thorough solution

To really fix the problem, you'll need to edit the registry. The usual cautions apply: back up your PC first, be very careful, wash behind your ears ...

• Close Power Point
• Open registry editor (Start /Run and type Regedit)
• Go to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\PowerPoint\Options]
• Create a new Dword value named AutomaticPictureCompressionDefault
• Make sure that the value of the new Dword is 0
• Close registry editor

Now, by default, PowerPoint does not compress pictures. If we want to enable compression, go back to the same registry key and change the value from 0 to 1.

Thanks to Marta Portela Maseda [Office MVP] for this tip, originally published on Fermu's Website. If you don't feel good about editing the registry, visit this site and click the text "reg file" and download the provided reg file. Doubleclick the reg file to make the needed registry edits automatically.

Contents © 1995-2008 Stephen Rindsberg, Rindsberg Photography, Inc. and members of the MS PowerPoint MVP team. You may link to this page but any form of unauthorized reproduction of this page's contents is expressly forbidden.

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