Rasterizing artwork?

On a mc at least there is no reason that I see to send a file to Word or Office as a raster image. These are placed ai files they retain the transparency and the file placed in Powerpoint was dragged and dropped from my desktop.

There re however reasons you might want to raster art. Say you wanted to resize art and give it a crude photo look or just give it a photo look or if you wanted to use some features in Illustrator that only work on images and there are a few, like  Create Mosaic then you might  do this as well.

Here by the way are ai files placed in Word and Power point I now recoomend only using .ai format to export to Word or Powerpoint at least on the Mac.

Pdf would be the other way but apparently only on the Mac unless that has change with Office 2010.