PPT: Using Colors in PowerPoint (135559)

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Internally, PowerPoint stores color information for every object using 24- bit (16.7 million colors) color definitions. Therefore, if you insert a graphic that contains 16.7 million colors, and you display it using a 24-bit display driver, you see all the colors.

However, when you run a PowerPoint slide show on a system that has a 256- color display driver, PowerPoint performs Palette Management. This means that PowerPoint sends a palette to the display driver that contains the 256 colors that it needs the most at that one time, and that PowerPoint can send a different palette to the display driver whenever it deems it necessary (usually when changing a slide). As long as you are running a color depth of greater than 256 colors, you won't have to worry about running out of colors. If you are running a color depth of 256 colors, and you have enough different graphics and gradients on a single slide so that the slide requires more than 256 separate colors to display, you may experience color loss, with or without an error message.