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AppleScript to change clipboard image format

coding macos office

For the longest time, I’ve struggled to get the macOS version of Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) to paste images as PNG or JPEG, instead of the default TIFF. TIFFs make the files far larger than they need to be! I’ve resorted to macros, shell scripts, Quick Actions... all paste PNGs (lossless) into MS Office! But I just found another method with AppleScript.

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Word Macro to paste MS Office Drawing / TIFF image as PNG

coding office

I really don’t know how to explain today’s post. In short: I want to copy drawings and images out of Microsoft Office in PNG format. On macOS, copy-and-paste seems to prefer the TIFF format, resulting in large Office files. I’d rather the images be converted to PNG, preserving transparency but providing high compression. However, this is more complicated than it seems, because of limitations in Office and PowerPoint in particular...

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Fixing PowerPoint Slide Show on External Monitor

fix macos office

I've been experiencing this problem for a while - when presenting using Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac 2016 (version 15) on an external monitor (or LCD projector), PowerPoint used to both the presentation slide show and the Presenter View on my notebook display, instead of Presenter View on the notebook and the full-screen slide show on the external monitor. Recently, I found the solution!

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