Compress Pictures

PowerPoint has come to the point where it is a good enough image editing tool.  I can get 90% of my work done purely in PowerPoint+Office Pictures Manager.  It may sound crude, but it works well to produce images at a dizzying rate.

Typically I'll just create the image I want in PowerPoint using the built in screen clippings/shapes/filters and then select "Save as Picture" (part of the right click menu).  However, in a particular instance I found that all images were coming out half the desired height.  In PowerPoint they were perfectly square, but once saved the png/jpeg/gif output was squashed to a rectangle twice as wide as it was tall.

On a hunch I gave "Compress Pictures" a shot.  This is a tool that often does a big reset on the internal memory of PowerPoint.  And low and behold it worked!

Often the image you see on the screen is a very small fraction of what PowerPoint remembers about an image (the application remembers all cropping, largest resolutions, transformations etc). Its a good practice to keep your files small and keep PowerPoint running fast to use this command often to remove unnecessary assets.