Printing Posters

Rachel's next task was to print full- sized posters of some of her slides. Unfortunately, PowerPoint will only let you set a maximum page size of 56 inches by 56 inches. Rachel needed a poster much bigger than that.

PowerPoint is not designed for printing large posters. There are better tools to do the job, such as MS Publisher, etc. However, since Rachel's content is already in the form of PowerPoint slides, she needs to figure out a way to print the posters.

The way to do it is to set up the page size as a smaller, but equally proportioned page. Then, when printing to the poster printer, put the poster paper in the printer and use Scale to fit paper to enlarge the slide.

The option to scale slides to fit the paper in a printer can be found in two places. First, you can set this option via the Options dropdown box on the Print Preview toolbar. You can also set this option directly in the File ’ Print window via a checkbox near the bottom of the page.

When creating posters by scaling slide sizes up, be sure to run a test print before creating the final poster. You may find some of the graphical elements need to be adjusted for quality reasons.

Poster Dimensions vs. Screen Dimensions

Another problem Rachel ran into was the difference between the ratio of the height vs. the width of the screen and the ratio of the length vs. the width of the paper for the flyers.

Rachel's screen shows were set up for the default screen size of 10 inches by 7.5 inches. Her posters were supposed to be 23 inches by 35 inches. The ratios between these two are vastly different. When Rachel changed the dimensions, she found the elements on the slides had moved around and the background graphic had been stretched .

Before sending the posters to print, she went back and adjusted the poster content so it looked the way she needed it.