PowerPoint Tips & Tutorials

Reduce the size of your presentation files

I can't count the number of times I've seen someone work hard on an ambitious presentation, test it all out, copy it to a laptop, and then have it fail when presenting. The reason is usually that the the presentation has become huge and the laptop isn't fast enough or doesn't have enough memory to handle it.

The first message is: Always test your presentation on the computer that you'll be presenting from.

The second message is that you should do everything you can to make your presentation file as small as possible. Here are some tips:

Images

The number one cause of large presentations is large image files. Many people insert photographs taken at high resolution that are over 1 MB each. The best solution is to create the images at lower resolution, but when you don't have that choice, here are some options:

• Reduce the size of the image. You can do this in PowerPoint, but you'll have more options in an image editing program. If you have Photo Editor (free in Microsoft Office 2002 and earlier), choose Image > Image Size. In Adobe Photoshop, choose Image > Image Size. If you want the image to be the size of a typical slide, change the width to 10, with the Constrain Proportions check box checked. In many cases (such as a photo from a digital camera), the height will change to 7.5, just what you want to cover the slide.
• Crop the image. All image editing programs allow you to crop. Get rid of everything around the edges that you don't need.
• Reduce the number of colors. In Photo Editor, choose File > Properties and use the Type drop-down list.
• Compress in an image editor. You can compress BMP and TIF files. In Photo Editor, choose File > Save As and click the More button. Choose an option from the Compression drop-down list. In Adobe Photoshop, choose Image > Image Size. Write down the dimensions in pixels and change the resolution to 72. Then re-enter the dimensions as they were to compress without resizing.
• Compress in PowerPoint 2002 and 2003. Select any image to display the Picture toolbar. Click the Compress Pictures button. In the Compress Pictures dialog box, compress the selected image or all images, choose a resolution (use Web/Screen for the smallest size), and also choose to delete the cropped area of images -- so you can't restore the image to its original size. Click OK and then save the presentation under a new name -- just in case you don't like the results. I took a PowerPoint presentation with one BMP file and reduced it from 4,561 KB to 831 KB this way. A JPEG photo that I took with my digital camera went from 383 KB to 41 KB!
• Reduce quality (JPEG images). In Photo Editor, choose File > Save As and click the More button, where you can use the JPEG Quality Factor slider. In Photoshop, choose File > Save For Web. In the Save for Web dialog box, choose JPEG Medium (instead of JPEG High) from the Settings drop-down list. This changed my photo from 41 KB to 15 KB!
• Convert the image file type. The image file type makes a huge difference. In my tests of a photo, JPEG files were the smallest by far. (GIF files are also small, but are not suitable for most photographs because they don't support enough colors.) I took an image and used Photo Editor to convert it. Then I inserted each one into a different presentation, so each presentation had one slide with one image. Here are the results:

• Convert embedded graphics to PowerPoint objects. If you used Insert > Object to embed an object, it's hard to tell what may be in that image (or charts or spreadsheet). Try to ungroup it (right-click it and choose Grouping > Ungroup). Then regroup it again. Note that you won't be able to edit the object with the original program, so save the presentation under a different file name, just in case.
• Don't copy and paste, or drag 'n drop, images into a presentation. Instead, save them as a separate file and insert them as a picture. If necessary, you can copy and paste into an image editing program and save the image there before inserting it into PowerPoint.

Note: Photo Editor is no longer part of Microsoft Office.

File handling

Here are some file handling tricks that can also reduce the size of a presentation:

• Save the file under a new name. PowerPoint remembers all your actions in a session so that you can undo them. Saving under another name discards this information. For some reason, this works better than closing and opening the same file.
• Disable fast saves. This feature increases file size. Choose Tools > Options. On the Save tab, deselect the Allow Fast Saves check box.
• Don't save in PowerPoint 95 compatible format -- it's much larger.

For more ideas, see Steve Rindsberg's "Why are my PowerPoint files so big?"

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