Five Tips To Reduce The Size Of Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations

Microsoft PowerPoint presentations can take up lots of hard drive space. The size of the presentations depends largely on the multimedia content - that is pictures, videos and audio - that has been added to the presentation by its creator. While this usually is not a big problem for presentations that do not have to be distributed it could become one if the document has to be distributed to other users. The following five tips will help uses to reduce the size of their Microsoft PowerPoint presentations so that their distribution does not put as much weight on the network infrastructure than before which saves costs and time.

1. Use the new pptx format instead of ppt where possible. Saving a blank Microsoft PowerPoint presentation as pptx instead of ppt decreases the size of the presentation by about 70 Kilobytes. The new PowerPoint format handles multimedia content - especially pictures and photos - much better than the old format. Dragging a 1.2 Megabyte image into the blank PowerPoint presentation resulted in a pptx file size of 1.25 Megabytes instead of 5.62 Megabytes which the old ppt format occupied.

2. The biggest size reductions can be achieved by optimizing multimedia content in PowerPoint presentations. It usually comes down to images that have been added to the presentation but also other forms like videos or audio content.

You can compress all pictures that have been added to Microsoft PowerPoint by clicking on Format > Compress Pictures in PowerPoint 2007.

Selecting Screen or Email in the advanced options will reduce the size of the PowerPoint presentation further. It might however degrade the quality of the picture.

3. Please note that it is sometimes not possible to compress an image further especially if it already has been in a compressed picture format. It might however help to decrease the size of the image to reduce the overall size of the PowerPoint presentation. Many users add images that are to large to the PowerPoint presentation instead of reducing the height and width before adding it. It is always a good idea to optimize images in height and width before adding them to the PowerPoint presentation.

4. Use hyperlinks to multimedia content if possible. Not all video and audio content has to be embedded into the PowerPoint presentation. It sometimes make more sense to upload the content to a server (for example Ovi)on the Internet instead of embedding it directly. This will reduce the size of the presentation so that it becomes easier to distribute. 

5. Save the PowerPoint presentation in a different format. Saving the same PowerPoint presentation (that uses 1.25 Megabytes of space in pptx format) as pdf reduces the file size to 352 Kilobytes. While it is not always feasible to distribute a presentation as pdf (or flash) it might be the optimal in most cases.

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