PowerPoint Slide Sizes/Resolutions

There are two places to set slide sizes/resolutions in PowerPoint 2002 (XP). In Slide Show > Set Up Show... you can set the resolution to 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, or the current screen resolution. This is used when displaying the slide show and is stored in the PowerPoint program, not in the PowerPoint slide show, I think. In File > Page Setup you can set the width and height of the slide. This is stored in the individual slide shows. This second location has two interesting functions.

1. You can create vertical slides for 8.5 x 11 inch paper. Some faculty create their slide shows this way, not for projection, but for creation of overhead transparencies. Set "Slides sized for:" to "Letter Paper (8.5x11 in)" and set the orientation to Portrait. You can still apply designs, so you will end up with very professional transparencies.

2. When converting a slide show to stream using Impatica for PowerPoint, the page size determines the size of the impaticized file. The following numbers are from the Impatica web site and create a file size that will display the entire slide and the control strip at the bottom on the display size indicated.

For 1024 x 768 displays, set the page size to 10" x 7.5".
For 800 x 600 displays, set the page size to 7.5" x 5.6".
For 640 x 480 displays, set the page size to 6" x 4.5".