What's in a PowerPoint file? | editide
A PowerPoint presentation is a collection of slides. Each slide is a<br>canvas with text boxes, shapes, pictures, tables, and charts. There<br>are fancy things like animations, SmartArt, and video, but you don't<br>need those for 90% of professional slides.
A PowerPoint file is the place where you store all of that<br>content for your computer to read. It contains things like the text<br>you typed for a chart title, embedded Excel files with your chart<br>data, .png files with your company logo, and the<br>properties that determine how everything renders on your screen. The<br>title's font size, the data labels' font colors, the row heights for<br>your table, and whether your chart shows gridlines.
How do you store all this information?
You could try writing everything down in a text file. List out every<br>element and its properties.
Here's a dumb example: a blank slide with a single textbox that says<br>"Hello world!"
You could open up Notepad and type out a .txt file that<br>looks something like this:
Slide 1<br>- Width = 13.33 inches<br>- Height = 7.5 inches<br>- Background = white<br>- Text Box 1<br>- Text = "Hello world!"<br>- Font family = Arial<br>- Font size = 18<br>- Font color = black<br>- Position = 5.9 inches from the left edge, 3.5 inches from the top edge
Let's say you add another dumb slide.
You would add this to your .txt file:
Slide 2<br>- Width = 13.33 inches<br>- Height = 7.5 inches<br>- Background = white<br>- Text Box 1<br>- Text = "This is a circle"<br>- Font family = Arial<br>- Font size = 18<br>- Font color = black<br>- Position = 5.9 inches from the left edge, 2 inches from the top edge<br>- Shape 1<br>- Shape type = circle<br>- Fill = red<br>- Height = 2 inches<br>- Width = 2 inches<br>- Position = 5.7 inches from the left edge, 2.75 inches from the top edge
You see this and think to yourself, "Hmm, I'm repeating some stuff<br>that isn't going to change. Every slide has the same width, height,<br>and I'm just going to use the same font. Let me consolidate."
Presentation<br>- Slide width = 13.33 inches<br>- Slide height = 7.5 inches<br>- Background = white<br>- Font color = black<br>- Font family = Arial<br>- Font size = 18
Slide 1<br>- Text Box 1<br>- Text = "Hello world!"<br>- Position = 5.9 inches from the left edge, 3.5 inches from the top edge
Slide 2<br>- Text Box 1<br>- Text = "This is a circle"<br>- Position = 5.9 inches from the left edge, 2 inches from the top edge<br>- Shape 1<br>- Shape type = circle<br>- Fill = red<br>- Height = 2 inches<br>- Width = 2 inches<br>- Position = 5.7 inches from the left edge, 2.75 inches from the top edge
Better. But this file is going to be huge when you have a proper<br>30-page deck, so you decide to break it out into smaller files and<br>group them into folders.
presentation/<br>├── presentation_properties.txt<br>└── slides/<br>├── slide1.txt<br>└── slide2.txt
Charts and pictures
So far your slides only hold text and shapes. What about your<br>company logo?
Since you're already working with folders, just add a<br>pictures folder and save the .png and<br>.jpg files in there.
presentation/<br>├── presentation_properties.txt<br>├── slides/<br>│ ├── slide1.txt<br>│ └── slide2.txt<br>└── pictures/<br>└── logo.png
Then in your slide you just reference the picture file and specify<br>the size and position.
The nice thing about this setup is that if you use the same logo on<br>multiple slides, you don't have to save a copy of each picture.
Slide 3<br>- Picture<br>- Source = logo.png<br>- Height = 7.5 inches<br>- Width = 7.5 inches<br>- Position = 2.92 inches from the left edge, 0 inches from the top edge
You can use the same concept for charts. Excel files are convenient<br>for storing numerical data, so instead of reinventing the wheel you<br>assign each chart an .xlsx file for its data.
presentation/<br>├── presentation_properties.txt<br>├── slides/<br>│ ├── slide1.txt<br>│ ├── slide2.txt<br>│ └── slide3.txt<br>├── pictures/<br>│ └── logo.png<br>└── excel/<br>└── book1.xlsx
Then you make sure to reference that file when you write down the<br>chart:
Slide 4<br>- Chart<br>- Source = book1.xlsx<br>- Height = 6 inches<br>- Width = 9 inches<br>- Position = 2.17 inches from the left edge, 0.75 inches from the top edge<br>- Title = Chart Title<br>- Show gridlines = true<br>- Axis max = 6<br>- Axis units = 1<br>- Series 3 fill = gray
The three dots above are doing a lot of work. Charts have A LOT of<br>properties. You can make a single letter in one of the data labels<br>bold, you can make the horizontal axis line thicker.
You'll likely have slides with multiple charts, so for your mental<br>sanity you decide to move charts to their own files and use the same<br>file referencing strategy you used for picture files and the Excel<br>files.
You move the chart properties to their own<br>chart1.txt file and simplify the<br>slide4.txt file to:
Slide 4<br>- Chart<br>- Source = chart1.txt<br>- Height = 6 inches<br>- Width = 9 inches<br>- Position = 2.17 inches from the left edge, 0.75 inches from the top edge
The final folder ends up looking something like this:
presentation/<br>├── presentation_properties.txt<br>├── slides/<br>│ ├── slide1.txt<br>│ ├── slide2.txt<br>│ ├── slide3.txt<br>│ └── slide4.txt<br>├── pictures/<br>│ └──...