Creating Effective Academic Posters in PowerPoint: Tips and Tricks

On Mac, you can choose to insert the figure as a PDF page or a screenshot image. It's recommended that you insert it as a PDF page to keep the original high quality. 

• To use a PDF page with the figure
  • Use Preview to extract the page with the figure as a single-page PDF file
    • View -> check Thumbnails,
    • On the sidebar, delete the pages you don't want and only keep the page you want. Save the pdf file. 
  • In PowerPoint
    • Insert -> Pictures -> picture from file…-> select the one-page pdf file. (by default, the first page will be inserted if you have multiple pages on the pdf file)
• To make a screen capture of the figure
  • Command + Shift + 4, capture a portion of the screen
  • Command + Shift + 3, capture the entire screen
  • Command + Shift + 5, open Screenshot

On Windows, you can only take a screenshot and insert it into your PowerPoint slide. You might want to fill most of the screen with the figure to get more pixels. To make a screenshot,

• Use the Snipping tool
• Use 'Print Screen' button (PrtSc) /Windows button for the entire screen, then Ctrl+V to paste it to your PPT slide
• Use Windows + Shift + S to select the area, then Ctrl +V to paste it to your PPT slide

Apple has built-in support for PDF in its OS operating system so that you can insert a PDF page as a picture into a PowerPoint slide. However, the Windows operating system has no built-in support for PDFs. You can only link to a PDF file in a PowerPoint slide. For more information, go to Inserting PDFs into PPTs (Windows vs Mac).

• In Excel
  • create your chart and format it the way you want, such as colors and font. 
  • copy your chart. (right-click, and select copy)
• In PowerPoint,
  • make sure your Theme Colors and Theme Fonts are selected
  • paste your chart. (right-click, and paste). This way, you are pasting your chart as an object/vector graphics that has high quality. 
  • colors and fonts will match the destination in PowerPoint. The chart will have accent colors of the Theme Colors.
  • you can edit the chart with the tools under Chart Design Tab in PowerPoint, which is almost identical to the Chart Design Tab in Excel. your chart is also linked back to the Excel file. You can refresh data in PowerPoint if there is a change in the Excel data file.