December 2010 Archives

PowerPoint 2008 for Mac Print Slide Backgrounds

Most of my entries are about the cryptic errors that I encounter while writing code or using some poorly documented engineering tool, but consumer products by Microsoft can sometimes be complicated too.

Today I had a slide deck I was attempting to print on my black and white laser printer. No problem, right? Apparently now. The background image for these slides were pretty important. I walked to the printer and saw a mostly blank deck of slides. I had a sad. I searched around and could find on control that corresponded to the printing of slide backgrounds.

As it turns out selecting 'Output: color' (even for a black and white laser printer) is the setting I was looking for.

Just to review:

To print with backgrounds, use this setting

ppt_backgrounds.jpg

To print with no backgrounds, use this setting

ppt_no_backgrounds.jpg