PowerPoint master template background is pixelated when printed

I’ve just spent the morning struggling to understand why PowerPoint 2007 is pixelating the background image in my presentation when I go to print (it looks really blocky and nasty). I’ve had a special master template designed which includes a special background graphic.

The presentation prints fine when I add my background directly to the slide (bypassing the master template). However, despite my best efforts, PowerPoint 2007 has problems when the background is in the master template.

I’ve searched the web for answers but I think this problem is too niche to be documented anywhere … yet!

The bad news is that I don’t have a solution.

The good news is that I’ve found a workaround. The problem doesn’t affect earlier versions of PowerPoint. So I just found a copy of PowerPoint 2003 and printed my presentation using that. This is quite a nasty regression – I hope Microsoft fix it.

Although I’m a bit annoyed about this inconvenience, there are far worse things going on in the world.