Change Image Resolution in Powerpoint

Recently for one of my projects a teammate had created a simple Powerpoint presentation , the slides of which we later decided to use as a mockup for a website.

We wanted to make a video using these slides emulating the user interaction with the pages. I believe that the video authoring tool that was being used required images in order to create a video. Now, I haven't worked on any video authoring tool before, but then, of course I am supposed to be knowing a lot more about tech than I actually do now.

So, I said that I would try to export the slides as images and that they could be used by my teammate who was making the video.

I was making use of Microsoft Powerpoint 2010, which is a very good piece of software. Hopefully many of you would agree if you are using it. Well, if you don't agree, I am never in a mood to argue about Microsoft software.

One neat feature that Powerpoint has is that it lets you save your slides in the form of jpeg images. Just go to File->Save as->, and select the file type to be jpeg images.

The interesting thing is that the images exported are not of such a high quality. So, when my teammate added them into the video, most of the text got blurred.

Well, there is a crazy way to increase the resolution of the images when you are saving a Powerpoint presentation as a set of images. I could  not find any options from the UI, but it can be done by adding a registry entry.

1. Simply type in regedit in the command prompt or in the run manager or in your start menu.
2. Expand the registry to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\PowerPoint\Options
3. Add a new registry key from Edit->New DWORD Value
4. Name the new key ExportBitmapResolution and set its (Decimal) value to anything among these - 50, 96, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300. Maybe you can try other values and see if tha works out well for you.
5. Open Powerpoint again, and then try to save your file as a set of jpeg images. This time your pictures will be of a different resolution depending upon what decimal value you provided for the new registry key.

I am not registry expert but if you have some other version of Microsoft Windows or having some other issues, check out the official documentation at their site here and figure them out.

Signing Off 

Ryan