More is better seems to be the best way of describing American culture these days—leading to ever expanding waistlines, garages overflowing with unused stuff, and heftier credit card bills.

Well, there is one place, at least, where more really is better and that’s with the size of pictures on slides.

Many presenters who insert pictures leave them as scrawny little dejected creatures off to the side of text. Perhaps the image is merely a decorative accent, a stock photo or clipart figure that hopefully will increase the slide's visual appeal compared to looking at text alone.

Pictures have feelings, too, you know. Think about their self-esteem, after all. How would you feel as an afterthought thrown on a wall to pretty up bullet points? Why can't a picture be displayed big and macho? It's almost as though some kind of unspoken rule exists across cultures around the world stating: “Thou shalt not allow your pictures to cover the entire slide pane.”

It’s about time for a revolution to come. Break the shackles, now. Change, as we say today. Free your self-expression. Let those pictures realize their full glory by covering every speck of space on slides—no bullet points, no labels, no nothing. Then fill in details about why you are showing those pictures, or what they mean, verbally.

Pictures powerfully attract attention, especially when large and unencumbered by text. That's a good thing. You want to capture people's attention. They learn more and remember details better when interested and paying attention.

From a technical standpoint, here's what you need to know about making a picture display full-screen. PowerPoint’s slide area is designed to hold pictures that have a 4 by 3 ratio, width to height. To fill the slide pane, a picture must have dimensions of 10 inches wide by 7.5 inches tall.

In terms of pixels, if you are a graphic artist or otherwise know how to manipulate the physical qualities of digital pictures, ideally your image should be no greater than, or less than, 96 dpi. In other words, an image's overall pixel dimensions should be 960 by 720.

In that case, an image completely fills the screen and is perfectly optimized to have the smallest file size possible in PowerPoint, while still looking good to viewers (not appearing blurry or pixilated).

If all these technical details sound like geek-speak and don’t make any sense at all, you may want to grab one of Aspire's Relational Presentation books and read through chapter 6. That's where you'll find ever detail about pictures your grandpa never taught you. Otherwise, just make sure pictures cover the entire slide pane and don’t look blurry in the process.

Pictures that are perfectly optimized to fill a slide pane (both resolution and physical size) tend to have a file size in the range of 75K to 150K when saved as JPEG images. If your pictures are a lot larger than this, they probably are not properly optimized and increase your presentation file size for no good reason.

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