There is a persistent mythology in the office/corporate world that the suite of Microsoft Office applications, MS Word and PowerPoint in particular, are useful and capable for creating print-ready materials, that is, printed professionally at a print shop. Along with that follows the corollary that web graphics are just as good for print, and thus many logos are grabbed from web pages and given to some designer or marketing department to use for brochures and other printed materials.
Now both of these are as far from the truth of good graphic art as you can get, and each for its particular reasons. The Microsoft Office applications are what is of particular interest to me here.
Now, to be fair, some of the reasons for this are not completely the fault of the programmers’ lack of vision or ambition. The aim and purpose for these apps does not include print-ready work, such as annual reports and brochures. They were intended to be used for work that will be printed on the office copier/printer.
In return, Microsoft never has placed any kind of disclaimer on their packaging or installer that squawks to the user, “Don’t use these for anything you need to print professionally!” And so there is still much ignorance in circulation over the Office Suite. For that matter, any office productivity application is the same, including Open Office, iWork, and so forth. And with the introduction of MS Word’s Publishing View, people are even more apt to be mislead.
Do you realize there are still (and probably still will be) many MS Office files getting submitted to print shops? In fact, many probably are being submitted to print shops as PDF files saved out from Office documents, which in some cases leaves the print shop employees rather stuck with how to properly service them. But that is a topic for some future article.
But let’s tackle one small issue first, and that is what kind of graphics should be placed in an Office document in order to get a decent output from an office printer? When it comes to presentations made solely for on-screen viewing or projection, and mostly from PowerPoint or some like application, it really is of no consequence what the overall quality of an image is. As long as it looks good on screen, it will display or project just fine.
There are many file formats you could choose, but the best are PNG, JPEG, EPS or PDF. I like the PDF option the most, because it can accommodate vector elements as well as raster or photo elements. Also in my most recent tests I have found that the latest versions (2010/2011) of Microsoft Office handle EPS files very well, even rendering them on screen in PowerPoint presentations with surprising quality. (Some of you may remember that EPS files used to only display their lo-res preview in older versions of PowerPoint.)
Printing is another issue altogether, of course. To get this right (for those of you who may not know) we have to look at something called resolution. Resolution has to do with pixels, which is what any kind of digital photograph, for example, is made of. The resolution is usually measured in either of two ways. One is the total number of pixels in an image. For example, a photo at 8 megapixels is basically 8 x 1024 or more than 8,000 pixels across. Otherwise, look at the published dimensions of the file, and note how many pixels in an inch (or whatever unit of measure you use). For example, if our 8 megapixel image were printing at 10 inches across, then it would be roughly 800 pixels per inch across. That’s what we would call a high resolution image.
For screen display or projection of MS PowerPoint images, they need only be at the most 100 pixels per inch, and can easily get by with less. For print, it has generally been the rule to have an effective resolution of 300 pixels per inch, or 300 ppi, all for reasons we don’t have the time or patience to explain here. Let’s just say that it’s regarded as enough density to keep from seeing individual pixels on the page.
Also remember to keep the scale of your graphic to maintain the resolution of 300 ppi. What throws that out is enlarging your graphic. Generally you can scale down, but not up. Scaling up will reduce the overall resolution. If my graphic came in at 2 inches wide and 300 ppi, then I scaled it to 4 inches, it would be only 150 ppi, because at twice the size, it will be half the original resolution. We effectively spread those pixels out over a greater dimension.
When you initially import a graphic into an Office document, it will come in at the original size and resolution at which it was created. That is helpful, because in earlier versions, it might come in at an unpredictable size. On the other hand, it can be hurtful if you are importing that 8 megapixel photo.
Now let’s discuss the fun topic of color. If you’re not familiar with the subject, there are two basic color models we work with in the document publishing world: RGB and CMYK. RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue, which are the main colors that separate from white light. This is what all electronic displays use, from TVs to your iPod screen. On paper, we have to place pigments mixed together to render all the possible colors. We can’t afford to print lots of colors, so a process was invented to mimic the opposite of what RGB does. Making that long story short, we use Cyan (opposite of Red), Magenta (opposite of Green) and Yellow (opposite of Blue). And we add in Black (K) to give us a real black, because the other pigments are not perfect.
With all that said, Microsoft Office and all other office applications use the RGB color model. Professional printing uses CMYK. So that makes MS Office documents incompatible with the printing process, initially. The fact is, however, there is less need for CMYK original documents. There is more than enough technology that is able to convert RGB documents to the needed CMYK for the printing press. The only caveat about it is that if you leave your document RGB and have your print provider convert the colors to CMYK, then you have no real control or say in what the end result will be, because colors will shift, especially if you picked out bright colors.
One solution would be to pick colors, not from the default Office applications’ set, but from the computer’s color mixer app via the More Colors... option. In there, choose the CMYK sliders to make your colors (sorry Windows users, this is only on the Mac OS!). Sure, the color model is still RGB, but at least your color choice will fit the range of colors CMYK can reproduce on a press.
If you do have to send a Microsoft Office document to a print shop, don’t. The best strategy is to save it out as a PDF file. This will prevent the printer from not getting the proper fonts and graphics that you used in your documents. However, if changes need to be made, you will need to make them and send the print shop a new PDF file. New versions of MS Office have the PDF format as an option in the Save As dialog, and believe me, it makes a better initial quality of a PDF file than using such things as PDFMaker.
In conclusion then, you have challenges and choices in how you use Microsoft Office applications, what you place in them and for what you use them. Keep the ideas I discussed here in mind, and you will have better quality results.
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