Apple - How to not compress inserted pictures in Powerpoint 2011 for Mac?

In Word and PowerPoint for Mac 2011, you can change the compression behaviour for a placed bitmap image via the Format Picture ribbon. Double-click the image to bring that ribbon to the front, then click the Compress button and choose the option Keep Current Resolution. Or, choose File > Reduce Size to bring up the dialog box. This needs to be done before the presentation is saved with the newly placed image.

It's different for vector graphics from PDF files, which PowerPoint will simply convert into bitmap graphics and compress as soon as the presentation is saved with the newly placed PDF file. This can be avoided in MS Office by using vector graphics in the .EPS file format or in Microsoft's own .EMF format, which can be exported from most vector graphics editors, e.g., Inkscape, OpenOffice Draw, Adobe Illustrator, etc. (Beware: PDFs exported from bitmap editors like GIMP, Photoshop, or Pixelmator are not vector graphics images.)

You might be out of luck if you do not have the originals, as you know now the 2010 was compressing the pictures.

First save the picture to hard drive and open it with something like iPhoto.

If you like the quality there we can continue.

If you do not like the quality it is the end of the road, no advanced settings will help here.

You could report the picture file size here, like is it in 500k- 1Meg, or more or less than 100k.

In second case your only option is to keep the picture size as small as possible to retain the quality (resolution).

EDIT:

If the pictures look good in original presentation then lets try this.

Do not copy paste.

Use presentation mode (full screen) and make a screenshot (press cmd+shift+4). You will get a cursor allowing you to select the picture., and once you have done that it will save it.

Now take look at that result first, and if happy then import it in to power point.

Thanks to Buscar for making me to look more deeply into this. It seems that the preview/editing space in PP for Mac visually compresses the pictures (i.e. text is somewhat sharper than pictures, no matter how high quality they are). However, this difference disappears in the Slide Show mode.