Girl, You So Skinny!
3 Tips for Shrinking Your
Presentation File Size
For the past week, I’ve been working on an image-heavy PowerPoint presentation and the file size is growing faster than the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man while causing quite as much damage to my sanity.
So, being the Renaissance woman that I am, I use the internet to solve all my problems and overwhelmingly, the advice for deflating file sizes was:
A: Compress your images (Tried it! Still slow!)
B: Go to Insert > File rather than drag and drop. (Great tip for next time, but if I’m looking this up on the internet, it’s already too late, buddy.)
But…with a little more research, Twitter polls, and prodding coworkers for advice, here’s a few less publicized tips I found that seemed to help.
3 (More) Tips to Get Your PowerPoint Skinny Once It’s Too Late to Bother With the “3 Tips to Keep in Mind BEFORE You Start Your Presentation” Blogs
1) Goodbye Fast Saves, Hello Save As. Choose Tools, Options (Tools, Preferences or PowerPoint, Preferences on the Mac). On the Save tab, remove the checkmark next to Allow Fast Saves. Then, Save As under a different name.
2) Group On, Group Off, Group On, Group off. Once you are done cropping and sizing the images (for good) select all and Right/Control click and go to Grouping >Ungroup. Then, lickety split, right/control click the image again and point to Grouping>Regroup. This tosses some extra and now unneeded data.
3) Once an image is in – copy, paste, paste, paste. Once you import an image (supposedly using Insert > File), then copy and paste it everywhere instead of inserting/dragging it into the file over and over again. PowerPoint will only save one copy of the image no matter how many times you use it. So paste frivolously!
*Exhale* See? That wasn’t so bad. And hopefully things speed up a little. Trust me, your co-workers will appreciate the consideration. But – what are you doing emailing a PowerPoint presentation anyway? Haven’t you heard of web conferencing yet?
Does anyone else have tips that seem to work for them? The world wants to know! (Via the comments section).
Sources: PP Tools , Microsoft, and big thanks to Tweeps @clikkaboy and @holdencalgary for your helpful tips!
Helpful tips, thanks! I always print as a .pdf. Recipients obviously cannot edit the presentation, but that is often a pro rather than a con. And, .pdfs are a fraction of the size of the .ppt.
What a great idea. Thanks.
This is really useful. I used to convert all power point presentations into pdfs and then compress the file size…now I have more options.
THANK YOU. my stinkin powerpoint crashes all the time, maybe shrinking the file size will help!
copy, paste, paste, paste = AMAZING.
More practical advice from the Blog Ninjette… Thanks.
This is really helpful, thanks!… and I thought I was a PPT wizard