Number 299 - April 2008

Slimming Down PowerPoint
Cass Lewart (r/ewart@monmouth.com), ACGNJ
If you ever worked with PowerPoint, and who hasn't, you realize how quickly PowerPoint files grow. What starts as a medium sized file of a few hundred kilobytes turns into a monster after you start adding pictures to your presentation. A large PowerPoint file of 10 Mb or more runs slowly during presentation, and what is worse, cannot easily be emailed as an attachment as many ISPs reject files exceedmg 10Mb.    New versions of PowerPoint contain built-in utilities to slim down the files but the results are not always consistent. One can of course resize one by one all pictures in a presentation but it is a slow process.    After getting a PowerPomt file of over 10Mb which I wanted to email, I did a Google search and came up with an interesting product which does the job effortlessly. It is a commercial product from Ontra Presentations in New York City. The program is called PPTshare File	Compressor. A single user license costs $40. A free trial version can be downloaded from www.pptshare.com and used for up to 10 compressions.    If you value your time the license fee is a bargain.I found that size reduction depends on the presentation content. Presentations containing high resolution pictures can be reduced by up to 90 %. Files containing mostly text and low resolution pictures can be reduced by about 50%. Some PPT files, which were manually optimized, can be reduced only slightly.    Remember that you never get something for nothing. A high resolution image in a PowerPoint presentation, which did not belong there in the first place, will be converted to .a lower resolution. You will probably not notice any degradation during a normal slide presentation. You will only notice some degradation if you start zooming in on individual slides.    The program runs on Windows 98, 2000, XP and Vista.
Number 299 - April 2008