Producting MS Office documents for distribution
When producing documents for distribution you should restrict yourself to standard fonts wherever possible (Times New Roman, Arial and Courier, for example - they may not be beautiful, but they are present on all PCs).
If you have to use other fonts restrict yourself to TrueType fonts and embed them in the document when you save it. Embedding TrueType fonts is an option in the "Save As" dialog-box in Microsoft Office programs - in Office 2003 click on the "Tools" button in the "Save As" dialog-box and choose "Save Options" from the menu. When saving the document for distribution you should choose the option to embed only those characters that are used, since this will keep down the file size. Problems have been caused by non-standard bullet marks in PowerPoint presentations, so you should stick to the standard bullets.
Images in your Word or PowerPoint documents should be compressed, to keep down the file size. Office 2003 applications have the option of compressing all images in the document, reducing the resolution either for screen or printer quality. The "Compress" option is found in the "Format Picture" dialog-box, and it can be applied either to one selected picture or to all pictures in the document. There is inevitably a loss of quality as a result of compression, but this may not be noticeable.
Many lecturers distribute the PowerPoint slides from their lectures. When doing this you should consider how they are going to be used. Many presentations contain good quality coloured images to illustrate points made in the lecture. In many cases the point can only be appreciated if the image is viewed in colour and at a reasonable size. Students are likely to print out the slides four or six to a page and in black and white or greyscale, in which case the point of the image may well be lost. However it is still present in the document at its original resolution and quality, swelling the size of the printed file. When preparing a document for students to print it may often be sensible to omit some or all of the images.
It will often be sensible to provide two versions of the presentation, one for viewing on the screen and the other for printing. In the printable version you might omit some images altogether, as suggested above, but if it is essential to include an image, it may need to be at a higher resolution than the image that you used for screen presentation.
