November 14, 2013

This post is for anyone who gets frustrated trying to place vector art in a Powerpoint deck.

Gwen had a project to produce a set of ppt templates, using vector art provided by the client. Copying from Illustrator and pasting into Powerpoint, it looked fine, but saving and reopening the file showed that the vector art had been rasterized—badly.

We tried a few variations on this. Saving as PDF and placing the PDF had the same result. Saving as EMF and placing that did keep it as vector artwork, but the graphic wound up being altered in the process.

Other graphics created in Illustrator could be pasted or placed just fine, so there had to be something about this particular graphic. Although it was relatively simple, it included a couple of potential gotchas: it had one element with transparency set on it, and another with a compound path.

It was pretty easy to release the compound path and reconstruct around it—a big O with the center knocked out to expose the background. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the problem, but it wound up helping anyhow, as I’ll discuss.

Dealing with the transparency was a little more of an issue: a transparent chevron floated over a couple of different solid colors, including the big O. To fix this, I used Pathfinder’s Divide tool to segment that chevron into separate pieces for each color it was floating over, and then set solid colors for each segment rather than relying on changing the opacity. Experimentation showed that the transparency was what triggered the rasterization.

Reproducing this process showed some artifacts in Powerpoint if the compound path was still present, so that wasn’t the problem, but it was a problem. Admittedly, this was only feasible because the image was simple, and the transparent element only covered three solid color fields, with no gradients or pattern fills—it would still be possible with those complications, but it would take a lot longer to approximate the original appearance.

Update: And if I was better at Illustrator, I would have realized the “Flatten Transparency…” command does exactly this, in one step. That would be the way to go.

This experiment was performed using two Macs, with Excel 2011 and both the CS4 and Creative Cloud versions of Illustrator.