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The Case of the Disappearing Slides

I was publishing course materials for a local college...everything was coming together very nicely. I was using Word to do the layout of the Student and Faculty Guides and it looked pretty great, if I do say so myself. :) The Faculty Guide used a two-column format to give the instructors narrative on the left and slides from the accompanying PowerPoint presentation on the right. Pretty slick.

So I was heading into the home-stretch, running spell check, checking headers and footers, page numbers, that sort of thing. Finally, with that happy-completion feeling, I printed the document. Cover page, great. Copyright info, fine. Table of contents, looking good. But then...Lesson 1...no slides. Lesson 2, no slides. Just an error in the graphic boxes where the slides should have been. What happened?

I had placed the slides by going into PowerPoint, copying a slide (click the slide you want in Slide Sorter view and press Ctrl+C), and pasting it in place in column 2 of the Word document. That worked fine while I was displaying the document on the screen, but when I went to print, Word couldn't find what it needed to print for the inserted graphic.

The fix? Paste Special. When you're pasting PowerPoint slides into Word, open the Edit menu and choose Paste Special, select Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Object; then click OK. Word pastes the slide at the cursor position and you can click and resize the slide as needed to fit your space (hold Shift while you drag to keep the size ratio of the slide as you resize it). Simple, isn't it? And of course now you have the added benefit of having an embeddedslide in the document, so if you ever need to make a change to the slide, you can simply double-click it to edit it in PowerPoint.

It was a pain to go back through the entire Faculty Guide and replace all the existing slides with the Paste Special versions of the same slides, but hey, you can never get enough higher ed, you know? Cya :) k