Four ways to reduce file size in PowerPoint
PowerPoint is a very complex application with very powerful features. Most of the time we just want our presentations to be in size as small as possible so they can easily fit in a floppy disk.
Another added benefit of small file size is that the lighter the file, the less computing and display power is required from the PC that will run your presentation. So your presentation can run reliably even on older, short on memory PCs, without slowing down your performance or the speed of your transitions.
What you can do to your presentation, in order to reduce its file size, is the following:
1) Save your presentation a second time With your presentation open, go to File >> Save As... and give it another name or just put a progressive number before the title. Then click "Save".
Doing this you will have a second presentation that most of the time is smaller than the original copy.
This happens since PowerPoint usually stores a lot of redundant information (formatting commands, earlier drafts, previous used images and so on). Each time you do a new "Save As..." the unnecessary redundant information is automatically purged, reducing as a consequence file size.
2) Go to File >> Properties and in the "Summary" Tab clear the box that says: "Save preview picture". This way you will not be able to see the little image preview when opening a presentation from PowerPoint, but your file size will decrease according to the "weight" of the images used in the first slide (the one that would be previewed as a miniature) of your presentation.
3) Work on the images
Your presentation might be very big due to the use of many images in graphic formats like bitmap (.bmp) that you automatically obtain when you paste a screenshot on the slide.
The suggestion is to open every bitmap image you have with a program that converts images (ACDSee, Microsoft Photo Editor, PaintShop) and save that image in one of the following graphic file formats: jpg (a compressed format where you can set the compression/quality ratio according to the quality of the original image), gif, tif, wmf (Windows Meta File, a very common standard for Windows applications).
Once your image has been saved under another format, you can reinsert it into your slide.
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If you do this for all your images, your presentation will be much smaller and it will run smoothly and fast.
4) Logo and Master Slide
If you insert a logo or a background picture in the Master Slide, be sure it is a jpg or gif and not a bitmap. Be sure also that what is in the Master Slide has not been re-inserted accidentally also on the single slides (logo, images and so on). The jpg format will give you the best balance of file size and quality.
Besides, when you resize an image within PowerPoint and scale it to a lower dimension, PowerPoint keeps the same file size of the original image. Thus an image that was for instance 200 Kb, will still be the same size even if you make it smaller. If you want to reduce also the file size when using a smaller picture, you should first scale your image down in any image editing software (Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor, Adobe PhotoShop, Corel Draw). Then, you can import it again into PowerPoint.
5) In case you have a lot of images that you have embedded in the file, you can opt to link the presentation to them. I explain: when you insert an image, you have the option to insert it either as an embedded object, that will become part of the final presentation file, or as a linked file. In this case the file will not be part of the presentation, since this will only contain a link to that separate file. You always have to remember, when you use linked files, to bring them with you and be sure that in the computer where you will run the presentation the linked files are present.
If you want to insert an image as a linked object, instead of as an embedded object, do the following:
1) Go to Insert >> Picture >> From File...
2) Select the image you want to insert
3) Click the little down arrow besides "Insert", and choose "Link to File"
The positive side of this is that the presentation file alone will have a smaller size, since the images will not be stored inside the presentation itself. So, even though you must remember to carry with you those other linked files, you can use more than one floppy to carry all the separate files to be copied in the hard disk of the computer where you will run your presentation.
You have to remember that file size can also affect the speed of your presentation, the animation effects and the transitions. If you want some additional tips on what you can do to speed up your presentation, do the following:
Within PowerPoint, go to Tools >> Options and in the "Save" tab turn off the voice: "Allow Fast Save".
For PowerPoint '97 only: go to Tools >> Options, "Advanced" tab. Clear the box that says: "Render 24- bit bitmaps at highest quality". This might decrease the quality of your presentation images, but will speed up a bit the show.
Remember that those last two features are computer-related, not file-related, so you need to change those settings in the computer where you will run the show, not in the one where you created the presentation.
You can read this article in the original issue of MasterView.
