Article
No Bob you can't use PowerPoint
Every so often I get someone asking for advice, which usually results in an article. Here's the latest tidbit.
It was just a little real estate brochure I did to sell my Dad's property. My husband took the pictures with his Canon Rebel Digital. Nice camera, works great.
He took photography classes so he does a pretty fair job of taking photos and I have Photoshop to tweak the overly dark ones. Shooting good pictures inside can be tough.
The brochure wasn't anything terribly special. Not "cutting edge", just my usual "function first" design strategy. We had someone put them in the mailbox for prospective buyers because it's a four hour drive downstate.
So I get a call. This is good. Wants to let me know that if I can't sell the property, he buys homes. O.K. fine I'll keep that in mind. Then he raves on and on about how beautiful the brochure was and did I do that. "Yes, that's my profession". (I really did go to school to learn how to do it.) "Wow...he's going to call me for his next brochure." I've heard it a million times and I'm not holding my breath.
I said "well Bob my e-mail address is on the brochure, isn't it".
Next day rolls around and I get a call. He's trying to put together a brochure that looks like mine. I'm not going to go into the whole copyright infringement spiel here.
"What program did you use", he says. "Pagemaker" I say, (fine for in-house printing and simple projects).
He says "well PowerPoint will do the same thing won't it?"
No Bob it won't do the same thing.
Now Bob is not alone. PowerPoint is a pretty cool piece of software. If you have Microsoft Office, it's handy and great for those business presentations.
Presentations, that's the key word here. PowerPoint is for visual on screen presentations.
For that purpose it's a great program. It is not commercially acceptable page layout software for print work. It isn't even non-commercially acceptable page layout software for print work.
If you give someone your beautiful 50 page document in PowerPoint, it will take several hours to extract the text to place into a bona-fide page layout program that a commercial printer can use. Then all the photos will have to be extracted, but they will look like garbage when printed. They will not have the quality (high resolution) necessary to print very clearly.
Yes, I know it looks great on your computer screen at 96 ppi (pixels per inch) and it probably prints pretty good on your home inkjet, but commercial printing isn't the same thing. Not even digital copiers like PowerPoint all that much and the person at the print shop is going to have to jump through hoops to make it come out looking half way decent. And it will cost you. The more time they have to spend, the more money you'll have to spend.
Color...it's all different. Your screen is RGB (red, green, blue). It's coming from a light source from the back of your monitor. I'm not going to get technical, just take my word for it. Mix it together and you get white.
Printing on paper is CMYK...(Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). Mix them (CMY) together and technically you get black. (In reality it's a dark muddy brown and black is added to get a really deep saturated black.) It will not be as vibrant as what you see on the screen. It's a different medium. It's as different as well...black and white.
What should you use? Well, if you are going to print on your home inkjet, try Microsoft Publisher or Serif Page Plus for around $ 130.00 is another option. I don't use either, but at least you will be in the same ballpark. O.K., that may be Little League, but at least the field looks the same. (Anything else below that and we're talking Whiffle Ball.)
Big League, we're talking InDesign and/or Quark Express. Pagemaker comes in somewhere in the minor league these days.
So, there ya have it from someone who has had to convert about 80 pages of a Directory from PowerPoint to something useable. Yes, it took me hours. No, I don't ever want to do it again!
