How to Compress your PowerPoint presentation
Have you ever wanted to send your PowerPoint presentation to a friend, peer, or co-worker? You create the email, proof your flawless presentation one last time before attaching it and then hit the send button. However, instead of moving on to your next task, you get an email failure notice bouncing the presentation back because the file is too large.
Often times people bombard their presentations with animation, clip art or high resolution stock images that bloat the file’s size. Little do they know how big their presentation is until they need to send it somewhere and realize that they either need to burn it to a disk or carry it on their thumb drive. Below are some easy solutions to address this problem that anyone could use to make the sharing of their presentations easier.
1. PowerPoint has an automatic application already built in the software to compress any images within in a PowerPoint to a smaller web format. This compressor keeps the clarity and integrity of the image by optimizing their resolution and removing any cropping you have done within the PowerPoint. To use this application in PowerPoint 2003, simple right click the image within the presentation and select Format Picture. This will bring up the Format box. Select the Picture Tab. You should see a button that says Compress. Click it and change the settings to Web/Screen. It also gives you the option to compress every photo within the presentation (something I suggest you click to save yourself from having to select all). Once compression is complete, save the document and the file should have decreased in size, sometimes significantly. PowerPoint 2007 is even easier. Upon inserting a picture, select the format Picture tool bar at the top of the page. On the left, you will see a “compress pictures” button. Select this button and apply compression settings. You can format PowerPoint 2007 to do this automatically with each file saving and even decide how much compression you want by selecting either the “print”, “screen”, or “email” compressing.
Here is Microsoft’s take on this: PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007
2. If you want to take compression a step further, you could optimize your photos before you import them into a slide. The best file format for images in PowerPoint are PNGs. These files are similar t o JPEGs, but are optimized and maintain their image integrity without being huge files. I typically format any images to PNGs through Adobe Photoshop, but if you don’t have that capability, you can also use a number of free online image optimization applications. I found one site that may be helpful: www.netmechanic.com
3. If PowerPoint compression or PNGs don’t work, you still have one more option in sharing your Presentation, or any other large files for that matter. Yousendit.com is a very useful website that allows anyone to sign up for a free account and send files that are 100MB or less to individuals through their server. You don’t actually email the file. You upload the file to their server and a link is created and sent to your recipient to click and download the file to their computer. It is a great, free service. The only minor drawbacks are that you have to sign up for an account. You are also limited in the number of 100MB emails you can send out each month, unless you want to upgrade to their paid version (which still isn’t that costly). Additionally, you are limited in the number of characters you can include with the file so make sure any additional comments you need to go along with your file are sent through your regular email. Your download availability is also limited to seven days, so don’t plan on using the link for long term storage.
Tags: Marketing
Useful Post.