Vector files at your fingertips with Powerpoint

I seem to be writing a few posts about Powerpoint these days, and I think it's mainly because I had a very limited choice of software to work with at the office for a while, so I was force to work with what I had. To my surprise, recent versions of Powerpoint are quite powerful and offer a lot of nice features for arranging or transforming graphics.

One of the great features that I have discovered lately is the ability to modify vector files directly in Powerpoint. For those of you not knowing what a vector file is, please read this post where I explain the difference between a vector file and a rastor file, or photo. The important point to know about a vector file is that it can be scaled without losing resolution, and it can be easily modified in terms of shape or color, as long as you have the right software to do so. Well that's what I thought until I learned about Powerpoint's ability to do so.

But before I show you how it works I just want to state why I think this is a really cool feature.

The reason why I love vector files is that they are drawn. You can customize them to be the right color, to match your style, to look like an icon, etc.. Options are infinite. And they are a much better looking option than cliparts when you need to illustrate a presentation or any other document. Finally, they are available in many places on the web, either for free on websites like Vecteezy or for a small price on Istockphoto.

How to modify a vector file with Powerpoint

Let's say you are writing an article about generating savings and you want to illustrate it with a piggy bank icon. After a search on the web you find a black icon that could do the job, but you would rather have it in green with a little bit more styling.

All you need to do is import the file in your Powerpoint presentation and transform it as you wish. Powerpoint lets you transform the file as a Microsoft object and it becomes a shape like the usual shapes you can draw from the Shapes menu (rectangles, ovals, etc).

Here is how to do it.

Step 1: import your vector file, here the black icon. It has to be a .eps file.



Step 2: right click on the file and select ungroup. You are then prompted with the message "This is an imported picture, not a group. Do you want to convert it to a Microsoft Drawing Object?". Click yes.



Step 3: Ungroup the object a few more times to make sure you separate all the shapes making the drawing. You are now able to change the color of the shapes as you wish, add drop shadows or other effects. Please note that there is usually an rectangle frame around the drawing that you will need to delete; just experiment with the colors until you get the right result.



Step 4:If you need to use the resulting image in another program, you can save it as a photo. Right click on the drawing and select Save as picture. You can save it as a .jpg  or maybe a .png file if you need to preserve transparency.

If needed, you can also alter the shape of the object itself, which is really powerful. For example here is a rectangle that I wish to distort.

Under the Format tab, click Edit Shape, then Convert to freeform.

click Edit Shape again, and this time select Edit points. You can now move the points of the figure, like dragging the corners of the rectangle, or making straight lines into curves.



Note: It seems like this feature is not available on Powerpoint for Mac, it just works on PCs. It might be that Keynote offers a similar took but I don't use this software so I do not know.