need to create .cil files (PC Powerpoint 98)

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Edited by Judith Tacelli on 17-Jul-01 16:22.

Hi,

I’m a freelance art director working on a Microsoft PowerPoint 98 project for a client. The slide show is about 110 slides, each with placed graphics. This show needs to be able to run on PC machines running Windows 2000 with only 64 megs of memory.

I am finding that placed .emf vector files (even though they are very small in size (12 k) don’t run on the 64 meg machines (out of memory issues). But with placed .cil (Clip Interchange Library) files the show runs fine.

My questions:

Is a .cil file a vector file?

What program is used to create .cil files?

Can .eps or .emf files be converted to .cil files?

Why do .cil files seem to take less memory to display than .emf files?

I would like to be able to convert all of the graph work I’ve done for my client as .emf files to .cil files so that they can use these vector graphics in the presentation.

Thanks in advance for any advice/help.

jt

—
Judith Tacelli
AT BOTH ENDS
judith@atbothends.com
617 686-1843

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Judith, here’s the little I know about cil files:
MS Clip Gallery
Q160475, loading CIL files from the Web into PP97
However these really don’t answer your questions, but maybe they’ll help others to find answers. Sorry. –Sam

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If I read Sam’s references correctly, .cil files are brought in by reference into the document. Which would explain why file sizes are so small. That answer doesn’t totally satisfy me.

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Good Day!

Honestly, I havn’t heard of .cil files… I don’t believe it is a common format, and if it is, it’s likely a microsoft specific format, and not widely available to the public. (This reasoning is spawned from at least 20 minutes of web-search, to no avail.)

While your users may have difficulty with .emf files, do they experience the same isseus with .wmf? The types are essentially the same, however in some cases, your users may not be ’emf compatible’ You may find more information on this here.

You may be better off converting your vector image into a more common format where applicable. This will not only be easily used by all of your users, but won’t kill thier systems in the process…

I hope this information helps, if there’s anything else, please feel free to let me know!

Regards,

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I too never heard of a ‘CIL’ file. I went to: http://extsearch.com/ and did a search and of 1800+ extensions ‘CIL’ doesn’t list.

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Dumb question. When you import a piece of clip art and ungroup it, you get a message about converting it to a MSOffice object. Could it be as simple as ungrouping and regrouping? At that point it’s a collection of objects on the screen.

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Thanks very much guys,

I’m going to try converting all the .emf files to .wmf files, place them in the original .ppt file and see if the new .ppt file will run on a 64 meg machine.

I’ll post and let you know if it works!

Thanks again,

jt

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My client finally tried the 107 slide .ppt test with placed .wmf files instead of .emf files on a 64 meg Windows2000, Office2000 machine.

The slide show progressed further than the one with placed .emf files but they still had out of memory issues by slide 55 or so.

Because my client wants the ablity to scale the illustrations at will and have the presentation print crisply for handout purposes, our workaround solution will be to create the master slide presenation with .emf files and then export each slide as a .tif file and reassemble the slide presention with the .tif files for use on the underpowered machines.

Not a great solution (it took me about an hour to do this process) but at least we have a solution.

Thanks so much to everyone who responded to my query.

jt

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