Today I was tasked with converting some PowerPoint files to TIFF files for my grandmother.  While PowerPoint has the ability to convert a presentation to a TIFF file, I found the resulting quality to be terrible. The text had no anti-aliasing and appeared very differently than the original presentation.

Additionally, PowerPoint provided no useful controls to set the size and DPI of the resulting file. (If you look hard enough, you can choose from three DPI settings under compression settings, but these settings were far from what I needed.)

I realized I needed to use an intermediary format if possible to get the presentation into a format that would retain quality and allow a more powerful tool to convert it to a TIFF file.

I chose to save it as a PDF (you need Adobe Acrobat Professional to do this, obviously). The resulting PDF retained all of the quality of the original file.  I imported this into Photoshop and selected the size and DPI values I desired and simply saved the output to a TIFF from Photoshop.

The difference is clear:

Left: Powerpoint to PDF to TIFF, Right: PowerPoint to TIFF

In conclusion, go the PDF route if at all possible.