On this example of Print Screen output from ArcMap, note the pixillated edges of the ellipses and the poor legibility of the smallest city labels.
On this example, note the improved appearance of the graphics and text. This picture was created from a map exported to PDF using Adobe Acrobat, and a Print Screen of the PDF was used on the PowerPoint slide.
What: The easiest way to get a picture of your map into a PowerPoint presentation is to use your computer's Print Screen function to capture a what is called a screenshot or screen capture of your map. Then you can paste the screenshot onto a slide in your PowerPoint presentation. We have found that using the Print Screen capture of the map in ArcMap isn't as good as using a Print Screen of Adobe Acrobat's PDF file of the same map. The ArcMap development team is working on improving ArcMap's rendering quality, but you can use the technique described below in the meantime. Additionally, we describe how you can crop the image using Microsoft's Paint program and how to copy and paste the clipped picture into PowerPoint.
Why: The reason to use a PDF image of your map is that Acrobat Reader uses custom anti-aliasing technology to render lines and text. A higher quality picture of your map in your PowerPoint presentation is more legible and professional looking.
How: To create the improved image of your map, you need to crop it and save it in a different file format. Here is how we created an image of our map for use in a PowerPoint presentation (you can download the presentation from the Introduction page for this map):
- Because we created this map in the ArcMap data view, we first needed to make sure the ArcMap window was set to show the map at the scale for which it was designed (1:275,000).
- We then exported the map to PDF format.
- We opened the PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
- Using Ctrl-Print Screen , we captured the screen image. You will not see anything happen when you use the Print Screen function. Behind the scenes, the operating system has placed the image on its clipboard, which means you can paste it in any software application that will accepted pasted objects.
- To crop the image, start the Microsoft Paint program -- either choose Paste from the Edit menu or use Ctrl-V on the keyboard to paste the image into Paint.
- The pasted image is still selected, so you can move it up and left until the map is in the upper left corner of the paint window.
- To unselect the image, click on another tool and then click on the Selection Tool.
- From the bottom right corner of the image (use the scrollbar, if necessary), resize the image and crop it the extent of the map. Do this by moving the cursor over the tiny selection handle at the bottom right of the image, click down and drag it up and left, releasing the mouse button when you get to the upper left corner of the map area. You may need to fine tune the cropped image by repeating these last three steps.
- Select the image in Paint using Ctrl-A on your keyboard, and copy it to the clipboard using Ctrl-C.
- Open your PowerPoint presentation and on the slide you want your map to appear on, choose Paste from the Edit menu or use Ctrl-V on the keyboard to paste the image into PowerPoint.
Sometimes we find that we need to resize this once it's in PowerPoint. To do that, right-click the image and choose Format Picture, or just double-click the image to get to the same dialog box. Use the Size tab to change the size.
One additional thing you can to to improve the drawing time and appearance of the image is to convert it to a BMP file. To do that, save the screenshot in Microsoft Paint to a BMP file format. Then open the BMP in Adobe Photoshop and save as a CompuServe GIF file, which creates a file that has an optimized palette of colors and it can reduce the file size dramatically. Using this BMP image in your PowerPoint can reduce the file size of your PowerPoint file as well.
If you would like to post a comment, please login.