Administration and Finance

Tip of the Week - January 10, 2007

Reduce the Size of Your PowerPoint Presentation

PowerPoint presentations can easily become very large. It is important to know how to keep the size of your PowerPoint presentations under control, particularly if you are e-mailing them or uploading them to Blackboard. Large files take a long time to download for people with slower Internet connections. Large PowerPoint files also open very slowly. Below are some suggestions for reducing the size of your PowerPoint files.

1. Save your presentation a second time!
Really, this works. Go to File and select Save As and just give your file another name and click Save. More often then not, your second presentation will be smaller than the original one, even though you haven’t made any changes! his happens because PowerPoint, like other Microsoft programs, adds a lot of redundant information (formatting commands, earlier drafts) to your file. Each time you do a new “Save As,” the redundant information is deleted, reducing the file size.

2. Compress Your Images
With PowerPoint, large files are almost always caused by image files. You might have high resolution digital photos from your digital camera in your presentation, high quality scans, or uncompressed bitmap graphics all throughout your Powerpoint. You should remember to scan and save your images in .jpg or .gif format at 72-100 dpi before you even
create your slide show. You should resize your images well in an external graphics program before using them in a PowerPoint presentation. But if you forget to do these things, you can take advantage of PowerPoint’s built-in photo-compression feature.
PowerPoint 2002 and later versions can compress all the images in your presentation at once.
1. Right-click on a picture, and then click Format Picture on the shortcut menu.
2. In the Format dialog box, click the Picture tab, and then click Compress.


3. Under Apply to, click All pictures in document.
4. Under Change resolution, click Web/Screen.
5. Under Options, select the Compress pictures check box and the Delete cropped areas of pictures
check box.

6. Click OK.
7. If prompted, click Apply in the Compress Pictures dialog box.

3. Insert Pictures, Don’t Copy and Paste!
Whenever an image is copied to the computer’s clipboard and pasted into PowerPoint (or Word), the image is pasted as a bitmap, regardless of the file format of the original image. This results in a much larger PowerPoint file than necessary. The easiest (and best) way to insert a picture is to go to your menu and select Insert, then Picture and From File. You can browse and select the photo you would like to add to your presentation.

4. Always Save your PowerPoint as a "Presentation"
Make sure your current version of PowerPoint is saving as “Presentation,” not PowerPoint 95, which doesn't’t support compressed images.

5. Don’t Allow “Fast Saves”
The “Fast Saves” option in PowerPoint increases the size of your presentation. Fast Saves appends changes to your presentation instead of just incorporating them. To turn this off, go to Tools > Options and click the Save tab.
Clear the “Allow fast saves” check box and click OK. After you’ve turned off the “Fast Save,” save your presentation again under a new name.



6. Include a Blank Slide at the Beginning of the Presentation.
Although it may seem that adding a slide to a presentation would increase file
size; this technique actually has the opposite effect. The first slide in a PowerPoint presentation serves as the preview image – the thumbnail image displayed when you preview a file in the Open dialog box. Since a blank slide is far less complex than the actual first slide, the preview
image stored as part of the file is much smaller, thereby reducing the overall size of the presentation.

To create a blank slide at the beginning of your slide show:
1. In “Slide Sorter View” put the cursor before the first slide by clicking to the left of it.
2. Go to “Insert” on the Menu bar and select “New Slide.”
3. If you see a “New Slide” dialog box, select “Blank Slide.” If you do not, go to step 4.
4. The newly inserted blank slide that appears will also be highlighted/selected.
(Don’t click on this slide or anything else. If you do the new slide will not be selected and you will have to select it again.)
5. Select “Background” under “Format” on the Menu Bar.
6. In the “Background” dialog box, click on pull down arrow (below the
Background fill thumbnail) and select a neutral color – Black is preferred
because it’s the best way to begin a presentation.
7. If you have applied a Design Template to your presentation, be sure to check the box is checked where it says, “Omit background graphics from master.”
This will eliminate any images that are in your presentation’s Design Template.
8. Click “Apply” – not “Apply to all” which would make the backgrounds of all your slides black.
9. Save your presentation.

Questions about this tip may be directed the ITS Support Center at ext. 4357 or its-support@unf.edu.

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