Below are a few tips and tricks I'm recording more for myself than anything, about making conference posters.
Poster Size:
Typically my posters are 36 inches in height, and 48 inches in width.
The place I currently work has hard-backed poster boards that you can pin your poster onto. These are 40 inches in height, and 60 inches in width, or 48 inches in height and 72 inches in width. I will need to adjust my poster size accordingly in the future.
Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT) does not allow slides larger than 56 inches in either direction. If you want to use PPT, and need a larger poster, then you are out of luck. You will most likely need to make the poster in Adobe Illustrator or other program.
Changing PPT slide size:
In order to make a poster using PPT, you will basically make your poster as one large slide. To do this, go to the "Design" Tab, and select "Slide Size". Then select "Custom Slide Size" and enter the dimensions of your poster.
High Resolution Excel charts for Illustrator:
If you've made charts using Microsoft Excel, you'll want a high resolution version of the chart for your poster. Select the whole chart by clicking on its boarder. Go to File, then Print. For the Printer, choose to "Print to PDF." Under Printer Properties, choose "High Quality Print." This will allow you to save the cart as a high quality PDF.
Download and open Inkscape (or other program of choice, though Inkscape is free). Open the PDF in Inkscape. The Save the PDF as an EPS file.
Open Illustrator and go to Object and select Place. Open the EPS file and place it in Illustrator.
High Resolution Screenshots for Illustrator:
Screenshots are rasterized-pixel images, so their resolution will be low, and basically unusable for an Illustrator-based poster because Illustrator is a vector-based program. There are a few ways around this.
First you can print the screenshot, scan it back to your computer in a high resolution, and place it in Illustrator.
Second you can TRY using the Firefox program-line, but the image you get will still be pixel-based, and only slightly better in resolution. This also takes a screenshot of the ENTIRE page, not just the screen- so be warned. Press SHIFT and the F2 button. Type in the command: screenshot --fullpage
Large Images in Illustrator ready for PPT:
If you've decided to make your poster in PPT, but have your images already made in Illustrator, you may run into some problems. First, Illustrator seems to have issues with exporting images that are over a certain number of points/pixels/inches. I'm not sure what the limit is, but you will receive an error stating that there isn't enough memory, or that the file size is too large to export, etc. These are frustrating. Here is a fix that I've used:
Open Adobe Photoshop. Open the Adobe Illustrator file in Photoshop. The image will be immediately rasterized. Save the image as a TIFF file. Warning, this is a large file size, but TIFF is loss-less so the resolution should still be high. Open PPT and insert the image. You might find that Photoshop has added some extra white edges. I am sure there is a way to re-size the artboard in Photoshop so this doesn't happen, but I don't know how yet. I simply use the PPT "Crop" feature to crop the extra white off.
Best of luck to poster makers every this conference season!
