Importing an Illustrator graphic

- [Instructor] The very top of this Infographic we're creating features this poor little boy that just looks like he's in terrible pain. Now I certainly didn't draw this graphic myself. I am not that talented, nor do I have that kind of time. I purchased this little guy from a royalty-free stock photo site, and downloaded it as an ai, or Adobe Illustrator file. The question then, is how did I get it into PowerPoint? Well, that is exactly what this chapter is all about. It is a very common workflow. And if you'd like to follow along, you can open up headache-boy.ai in Adobe Illustrator, which I have open right here. Now the first thing you need to know about bringing in or converting ai files to a format that PowerPoint will accept is that not everything formatting-wise will convert that easily. For example, in this graphic, the illustrator has used gradients in the forehead and around the armpits and the neck area, to show shadows, and to show that he's in pain, and that's not gonna convert very well to vector. Plus, we're not gonna use everything in this ai file. So to clean this graphic up, there's a really easy way to do that. In your layers panel in Illustrator, you can expand this area right here, and just begin hiding it using these little eyeballs. So take your mouse and just click on those eyeballs to temporarily hide them from view. That way, when we go to export this file that part of the graphic will not be exported. So I'm gonna leave this one open right here, and there we go. Now everything else is hidden from view. Now I want to dive in a little deeper to this guy right here and start hiding portions of his face, like this little gradient right here. So I'm gonna click on this arrow to expand that group, and now I can see his face here. Clicking on that arrow and scrolling down, there I can see where the gradient is, there. I can expand that, hide that. You can see how it disappeared in the graphic. And I can hide that there, and voila. Now we're gonna leave it as is for now, and let's start the export process. To export this Illustrator file to a format that PowerPoint will accept, let's go up to our file menu, down to export, and click on export as. Now there are two formats that the current version of PowerPoint will accept. If you are using the latest version of PowerPoint, it will take an emf file, or enhanced metafile, or svg. If you're using an earlier version of PowerPoint, before, prior to 2016, or a Mac version, stick with emf. So let's export this as emf, and I'm just gonna save this to my desktop, and click export. So now that's been exported as an emf. Now we can jump back over to PowerPoint, and I'm just gonna start from a clean, blank presentation. What I like to do is to create all of my emf's in just one simple file, and then bring them over to my Infographic at a later time. That way, everything's separate, and I can work. This is kind of like my working area that way. So here, now that I'm in my blank presentation, now I can import that as a picture, 'cause an emf is a picture file, basically. So let's go up to our insert tab, and click on insert picture. So now I can navigate to my desktop or wherever I saved that emf file to. There it is, headache-boy.emf, and click on insert. Now it will insert it as a picture, 'cause right now, it's looking at it as a picture. Now we have to go through an additional conversion step. We have to ungroup this picture, and I know that sounds a little strange, but it's just what you kinda have to do with these type files. So right-clicking right on top of that picture, and going down to group, ungroup. You'll get this warning message. This is an imported picture, not a group. Do you want to convert it to a Microsoft Office drawing object? Yes, we most certainly do. Go ahead, click yes, and notice what happens to our toolbar up here, on the ribbon. We have drawing tools format, picture tools format. One more time, let's right-click on this, go to group, ungroup again, and notice what's happening to our object. It's been ungrouped into a bunch of different pieces. Now I can go through and start moving around. Now every single imported emf object will have this bounding box around it. See, I'm moving this invisible frame? You can go ahead and delete that. It's pointless, really. But all of your vector shape, your object, will now have these little pieces to it. So you can see it better, let me change the background color of the slide. There it is. Now notice where I have these little white pieces, notice how I said earlier, that portions, anything that had a gradient around it wouldn't import correctly, and the areas by the neck and the armpits had a gradient by it. This is what happens when you try to import a gradient. It imports it as a picture. So here's what that looks like. See it clean, vectors? Picture, see how it looks kind of pixelated? That's the difference between a vector and a picture. So you want the vector so it's clean and scalable graphic. You can make that vector graphic as big as you like, and it won't look pixelated. Pictures, not like that. So I'm gonna delete these pictures. We don't need them, but our vector boy in pain, there he is. Oh, I feel so sorry for him. I know how he feels. But now that he's a vector graphic, we can go through and edit him in PowerPoint. If we don't like the color of his shirt, we can select that shirt. We can go up here. We can change that color of that shirt to anything that we want. We wanna give him a purple shirt? We can give him a purple shirt. Anything we want we can change. It's just that simple. So there you go. And that is importing an Illustrator graphic into PowerPoint.