MVPs for Office and SharePoint 2010: Save as Picture Presentation

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by MVP Echo Swinford as part of the MVP Award Program Blog's "MVPs for Office and SharePoint 2010" series. Echo Swinford is a self-employed PowerPoint trainer and consultant. She has been a PowerPoint MVP since 2000. Find more PowerPoint tips and tricks on her website: echosvoice.com.

Some of my favorite features of PowerPoint 2010 are also the best hidden! Save As Picture Presentation falls into this category.

A quick and dirty way to protect your presentation from editing is to save the slides as images and then reinsert them onto a new, blank presentation. This allows the recipients to rearrange and even delete slides, but it prevents them from changing the actual content on any of the slides.

In the past, we’ve had to perform all the saving and reinserting and re-sizing image steps manually, but PowerPoint 2010 lets you do it all with one click!

To use Save as Picture Presentation, open the presentation you want to convert to a picture presentation. Click file, Save As.

Click the Save As Type dropdown, choose PowerPoint Picture Presentation (near the very bottom of the dropdown list) and click Save to save the file.

That’s all you have to do! The Picture Presentation will look just like your original presentation, but the slides will be images. The picture slides will use the same transitions as the original slides, and slide titles will be transferred so you can navigate easily during slide show view. 

Unfortunately, there’s no option to include your speaker notes. If you need these, you can copy/paste them in slide-by-slide or check into the inexpensive add-in called Protect at https://www.pptools.com/index.html.