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How To Reduce The Size Of Your PowerPoint Presentations
PowerPoint presentations have a habit of becoming huge, overblown files. It stops you easily e-mailing files between clients and colleagues, and has huge memory overheads everytime you open the file. Any presentation, even one full of images, shouldnt be over 20MB. ThatҒs crazy! Here's a few tips and techniques to cut those filesizes right down.
PowerPoint presentations have a habit of becoming huge, overblown files. It stops you easily e-mailing files between clients and colleagues, and has huge memory overheads everytime you open the file. Any presentation, even one full of images, shouldnt be over 20MB. ThatҒs crazy!
Firstly, make a few changes to your PowerPoint preferences.
Click the Tools menu, then Options. Click the Save tab, and clear the Allow fast saves checkbox. This will stop PowerPoint storing extra data in your presentations, and really doesnt make a difference to the speed your computer saves.
Make sure the Embed Fonts option is clear too. Embedding fonts massively reduces the file size of your presentations. ItҒs much easier to send the TTF files with your presentation.
Now, heres a few quick tricks to reduce the file size of each of your PowerPoint presentations.
1. Compress the images
Double click on an image. Click the picture tab. Click the compress button on the bottom left of the dialogue box. Choose ґApply to all pictures, ґWeb/screen resolution, ґCompress pictures, and ґDelete cropped areas of pictures. Click OK twice.
This drops the quality of all the images in your presentation down to screen quality. Most people use images of to high a resolution in PowerPoint, simply because they donҒt know how to reduce them. You dont need print quality resolution images, just screen resolution. You wonҒt even notice the difference, other than having a smaller file.
2. Delete the notes pages
This is optional. Some people like them. Personally I hate them. If you have a script to read, edit in Word, your life will be so much easier. PowerPoint makes an awful word processor.
So go through your presentation and delete the contents of the notes pages. This will save you a bit more file space.
3. Re-save the file
Go to the File menu, and click Save As. Re-save the file, but this time with a new filename, different from the last one.
I know that doesnt logically make sense, but youҒll find this third step saves quite a bit of space!
Remember to check the master slides too. If youve copied and pasted slides into your presentation, you may have multiple copies of the same master slides. Just delete them from the thumbnail preview panel on the left hand size.
Apply all these three steps to reducing the size of your PowerPoint files and youҒll live in happy, unbloated PowerPoint heaven!