Creating print files from Microsoft PowerPoint 2007
These instructions do not guarantee the correct creation of your print files. Rather they are intended as an assistance. If you are not familiar with how to create print data and use these instructions, we recommend that you order a data check at a charge as an extra option to your order.
Office programs are generally not suitable for creating professional print data. But as many of our customers use these programs during their daily office work, these tools are often used for the layout of smaller print products.
As questions often come up in this context, we have set up a small guide that describes how to create printable data from Office programs. We will demonstrate the procedure in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 using the example of a standard DIN-Long flyer as you can order at www.onlineprinters.co.uk.
Creating a document
After you have created a new document, first specify the page geometry using the "Page Setup" button which you find under the "Layout" menu item.
The final format of the DIN-Long flyer is specified on the corresponding product page under "Details". It is 10.5 cm x 21.0 cm.
Here you will also find the note on the file format including the 2 mm circumferential bleed. You need this bleed as tolerance for cutting your products. The final file format is thus 10.9 cm x 21.4 cm. Enter the dimensions as paper format into the corresponding fields.
Placing text and images
You can now begin to configure the actual layout of your document.
Position writing and important information such as logos, addresses, texts, etc. that should not be cut off leaving sufficient distance to the edge of the final format – we recommend a margin of at least 5 mm. We recommend 4 mm margin clearance to the final format on each page. (attention: a different recommendation exists for advertisement systems and brochures. Go to the Details of a product for more information). To this add 2 mm bleed tolerance per page which must not contain any important information as they are cut off. This results in a clearance of 6 mm to the document format margin (10.9 cm x 21.4 cm).
Elements such as images or backgrounds which should reach beyond the final format edge, such as for instance the logo bar shown below, must reach 2 mm beyond this edge, that is they must reach up to the file format edge.
We generally recommend our customers to use the colour mode CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) for image files as these are also the printing colours used later on. Office programs are primarily designed to display documents on the screen. This colour mode is thus not available in these programs. PowerPoint converts all data (also picture data already available in CMYK) in to RGB (Red, Green, Blue) colour mode. To print your products, however, we need the CMYK colour mode which is why we convert your data. Since the RGB colour range is much larger (it simply contains more possible colours) than the CMYK colour range, colour shifts can occur. This primarily concerns highly saturated and brilliant colours. Your Office program will thus not provide a true colour representation of your print data as we will perform the final conversion. The printed colours may therefore appear slightly darker and duller.
Moreover, your pictures should be in the file formats *.tif or *.jpg and have a resolution of at least 300 dpi (dots per inch) in the original size. If you do not have an image editing program, you can verify the resolution in Windows Explorer, by right-clicking on the file, selecting "Properties" there and clicking on the "Advanced" button under "File information".
Should you need assistance for positioning your design elements, you can show rulers and/or grid lines in the "View" section.
Output as PDF
Before saving your finished document as PDF, apply the following setting. Use the round button in the upper left section of the program window to open the "PowerPoint options".
Please make sure that the boxes "Embed fonts in file" and "Embed all characters (best for editing by others)" are enabled in the "Save" section. Without this setting the fonts you are using in the PDF document are not transmitted to us and we cannot correctly process your document.
Subsequently you can save your document as PDF. To open the corresponding dialog, again use the round button and click "PDF or XPS" in the "Save as" section.
If this option is not available, you can download the free "Add-in" from the Microsoft website: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/default.aspx
The below window subsequently opens. Please select PDF (we cannot process XPS unfortunately) as "File type" and next click "Options".
Configure the window that opens as shown in the following and subsequently confirm with "OK".
You now return to the previous view. Click "Publish" to save your PDF.
We recommend that you review the created PDF visually. For this purpose, we recommend the free Adobe Reader which you can download from http://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/.
Please note that you cannot open and edit a PDF document in Microsoft PowerPoint. Its sole purpose is to transmit your print data to us. Therefore, you should save your document in PowerPoint file format *.ppt at regular intervals, during and after the layout. You can do this using the round button under "Save" or "Save as". You can open and edit this file again and again.
We wish you much success with the creation of your print data and promise you that we will process the order you have placed at www.onlineprinters.co.uk in top quality.
Your Onlineprinters team