RE: Reducing file size in a PowerPoint presentation

Subject: RE: Reducing file size in a PowerPoint presentation
From: "Barnett, Eva" <Eva -dot- Barnett -at- aketontechnologies -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 09:05:12 -0700


Thanks for the help, Dick. My experiments confirm your experience; I tried resizing and compressing the jpegs in the presentation and it slimmed that baby right down! I was amazed at how compressable the jpegs were; I took a 734 kb jpeg, cut its dimensions in half, then compressed and smoothed it to "30" (percent? the photopaint UI didn't say). The new file is 52 kb, and you have to look _really_ hard to see the difference.

As far as the other two strategies, I just tried some experiments to see if they work. (I know, I should have tested before posting earlier -- sorry!) Basically, they don't.

- Jamming together a 1027 kb ppt and a 2078 kb ppt yielded a 2720 kb ppt (385 kb less than the sum of the two individuals). A single-slide presentation based on our template is 386 kb, so it looks like everything adds up.

- Recreating a 399 kb ppt presentation by making new slides and copy/pasting contents yielded a 396 kb presentation. A lot of work for 3 kb! My coworker claims to have successfully employed this method to drastically reduce file size; perhaps his presentation had somehow collected a bunch of junk?

Once again, apologies for posting misinformation and thanks for the help.

-Eva

-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Margulis [mailto:margulis -at- fiam -dot- net]
Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 7:28 PM
To: Barnett, Eva
Cc: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: Reducing file size in a PowerPoint presentation




Barnett, Eva wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> A coworker has asked me to help him reduce the file size on a big Powerpoint presentation he made. I searched the archives and the MS knowledge base, and I found some tidbits of info, but I thought I'd troll for more. :)
>
> So far, what I've gathered from the archives and from extrapolating what I know about Word:
>
> - Make sure your common graphics are on the master slide.


Okay, that works because you are only storing one copy of the graphic.
But you knew that one, didn't you?


>
> - Try starting up a fresh presentation, then inserting the info into new slides (I guess this is the ppt version of "maggie-ing")
>


That's a bit surprising, unless the original author pasted a Word doc
into the PPT to create the initial outline.


> - It seems like inserting slides from one presentation into another really bloats the file size


I'd be surprised if that's true, as well. But I generally work in a
single template, so dragging slides from one presentation to another
doesn't have much effect. Maybe if the templates are disparate and there
are a lot of manual overrides, this is a problem.


>
> What I'm looking for, in addition to any more tips you all might have, is an explanation of why these tricks work. I feel like I'm practicing alchemy, meticulously gathering bits of myth and lore. I'd rather have a more systematic approach :).
>


Okay, here's my biggest tip. Don't resize big images in PowerPoint.
Scale them in an image program (Microsoft Photo Editor works fine for
this) and knock the resolution down to something reasonable before
bringing them into PowerPoint. That's going to save you a lot of bloat
if you have to deal with even a modest number of images. Use JPEG in
preference to TIFF, too. (I'm not talking about screen caps; I'm talking
about photographs.)

Good luck,

Dick



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