Posted Tuesday, April 20, 2004

How to Turn a Microsoft Office Document into an iDVD Slide Show

On Apple's iDVD discussion boards, a user writes: "I have several 8x11.5" posters (text & graphics) that were created in MS Word (Office X) that I would like to include in an iDVD project as a slideshow. Any advice as to how I might convert these documents to images?"

Well, that sounded like a challenge to me. Turns out the solution is simple.

1. Open your Word document

2. Choose Page Setup from File menu and choose landscape orientation (sideways -- to match the orientation of the slide show).

3. Print to a PDF (in Panther, choose Save as PDF in the Print dialog box).

4. Drag that PDF into an iDVD slide show. (Yes, iDVD appears to accept a PDF just fine, at least in my quick test.)

Preview your DVD, and you should see the page appear as a slide.

Note that small text is likely to be difficult to read on a TV screen. You'll get the best results with docs that contain font sizes above 14 point. And use the Show TV Safe Area command (Advanced menu) to make sure nothing gets cut off.

Also, this tip works best if each poster is a single MS Word document. For multipage Word documents, you have to save each page to a separate PDF.

Although the original question dealt with Word, I suspect this would work very well with other types of Office documents, including PowerPoint slides.

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