The PowerPoint to Word Shuffle: Make it "Skinny"!
Applies to: Word 2003, Word 2007
If you find authoring notes in Microsoft Word infinitely better than adding them to PowerPoint slides, you've likely familiar with the File | Send to | Microsoft Office Word feature available in earlier versions of PowerPoint (2003 and earlier). This feature exports PowerPoint slides into a Word document as a graphic, leaving you room at the end of each page to insert your presenter notes or supporting documentation.
What you've also most likely encountered is the tremendous file bloat it produces as well. However with the release of Office 2007 that file bloat seems to have seriously been reduced with the use of XML; in our case, a simple 12 slide presentation of 152KB created a 1.09MB sized Word document. While that is still larger than the original PowerPoint presentation, it is much smaller when using Office 2007 (PowerPoint and Word) than in earlier versions of Microsoft Office.
On the chance you need to reduce your file size, here are the steps for 'making it skinny' with the features of DocXtools v5:
- In PowerPoint 2007, open your PPTX file.
- Office Orb | Publish | Create Handouts in Microsoft office Word.
- Choose the appropriate layout – we selected "Blank lines below slides", and left "Paste" the selected option.
- In Word 2007, use DocXtools | Cleanup | Do-it-yourself Cleanup, check the Graphics tool, "Reinsert graphics as picture", then click OK. Each slide graphic is reinserted as a picture, resulting in a nice Word document ready for you to fill in the blanks.
NOTE: DocXtools will save the document with every 15 graphics processed.
TIP: We got the best results when Word was closed as we started the "Create Handouts…" process. If Word 2007 was open we received errors messages that files were in use and most times PowerPoint and Word were often unable to complete the transfer.
