To mail or not to mail. That’s the question.

“PowerPoint” gives us the ability to save our presentation as a PDF file.

For this, we have two possibilities. One, you can send it as pdf-mail attachment, or two, you can save it as pdf.

 

 

Both options can be found under the “Save and Send” tab in the “Backstage” view .  Let me first start with the “Send using E-Mail” option.  If you choose this option, you actually have no control over your PDF file.  This turns your “PowerPoint” presentation into a PDF file and adds it as an attachment in your e-mail. Period!  There is little control over what should or should not happen in your PDF file, and it is a fairly large (in mb) file. So, not really my preference.

A second way is to choose the “Create PDF or XPS document” option that you find under the same tab in the “Backstage” view.
When you click on the “Create PDF or XPS document” button, it opens a dialog where we can navigate to the place on our hard drive where we want to save the pdf but, more importantly, here we have the option whether we want to save as “Standard” pdf size or “Minimum size” (1).
Standard size gives a better result of the images used in the presentation than the minimum size but, for a presentation with 12 slides that saves 750Kb.
So you can imagine when you create a presentation with 50 slides, you need to email a pdf of this to friends or colleagues, you know which one they will prefer to receive.

A second advantage of this choice is that you have some additional options (2).

 

When you click this button, it opens a second dialog box where you can choose which slides you want in your PDF file (1) and what type of slides you want in your PDF file (2).
By “What type of slides” I mean, the notes, handouts and so on.

My opinion is, if you wish to mail a PDF file of your presentation, create a pdf file first and mail the pdf file as an attachment in your email.

 

For your information:
An XPS file is a new file type for sharing your documents with all formatting.

Featured Courses

• Downloading iPad Apps
• Lesson 1: Introduction to Publisher
• Lesson 65: File Formats