Once upon a time we were all amazed at the ability to project our computer desktop onto a screen or wall and push out PowerPoint presentations at a scaled-down 800×600 (SVGA) resolution. Today, anyone can afford an HD-capable DLP chip data projector, and it’s becoming more and more common to install 16:9 aspect ratio screens in venues, or to use Plasma screens instead of projectors in smaller venues.
Every week I end up handling the task of reformatting presenter’s presentations to fit onto a 16:9 ratio display without squashing photographs and corporate logos or skewing charts and graphs. It’s a tough problem to tackle when you’re trying to convert a 4:3 presentation into 16:9 ratio – but it’s so easy to create the presentation in 16:9 format to begin with.
Within PowerPoint, you have the option of defining your own page size – here, you can enter a size that maintains a 16:9 aspect ratio, and you’ll end up with pages that fit a plasma or widescreen projection.
While you’re at it, there’s a lot of scope for improving the way you present by using widescreen. I’ll go into it more some other time, but for starters – consider that most objects we wish to insert into PowerPoint presentations are close to square – screen shots, photos, pie charts, etc… – These objects would normally fill the entire screen in a 4:3 format, but with 16:9, you gain space either side of the objects which you can use for annotations, style objects, and branding/navigational elements.
You may also find that a 16:9 aspect ratio will better allow you to display complicated tables, organisational charts, and panoramic photographs, or photo montages.
If you prepare your presentation in 16:9 ratio and then need to present it on a 4:3 display, you can output it letterboxed (black bars above and below the image) or you could re-create it by cropping out your background image and resizing the objects on each slide.