How to optimize and shrink your PowerPoint presentations

Performance really matters and keeping a good size of your PowerPoint presentations is important for many different reasons. In latest PowerPoint presentation program Microsoft did a good work to let the final user optimize the images and reduce the overall size. In PowerPoint you can optimize, shrink, or compress Powerpoint Presentations and its images.

This is commonly a problem that many users have when you start to add images to your slides and PPT files are becoming large and very large. If you have a PPT of four slides and nine pictures it can be easily over the 10Mb. This can be a problem for users who need to transfer files by email or even from a pen drive.

We already explained how to compress the files in PowerPoint using the built in feature, but if we are looking for an alternative solution here we will show you some options. See how to compress images in PowerPoint 2010 for more information relevant to this topic.

If you are good working with Photoshop or other editing software, then you can open the file, crop it and save in a JPG format keeping a good balance between quality and size. Then use the PowerPoint Insert menu to insert the file. Please do not copy and paste because the clipboard will use the bitmap format and that won’t be convenient because all the hard work we did to save the size will be in vain. You can learn more on this post about how to crop images in PowerPoint.

Alternatively, here are some 3rd party PowerPoint utilities that can be helpful to compress and optimize the size.

• CZ-Ppt2Jpg for Microsoft is a batch ppt converter that converts powerpoint files to JPG. Go to http://www.convertzone.com/ppt2jpg/
• NXPowerLite is an automatic program for compressing PPT files. You can download a free trial that is available for up to 10  users and then you can compress images.
• FILEminimizer Office (is the new PPTminimizer software) that reduces the size of PowerPoint, Word and Excel files by up to 98% using an intelligent compression technique. Go to http://www.balesio.com/

FILEminimizer Server optimizes your PDF, MS-Office and image files directly on the server. By using this solution you can reduce the data flow substantially and gain back storage space. The FILEminimizer Storage Analyzer is included in the FILEminimizer Server Version and detemines your optimization- and savings-potential of your fileserver, SAN, NAS, etc. There is no need to “zip” or “unzip” the files.

• PowerShrink is a program for compressing PPT files and presentations. By using this tool you can compress pictures and after the trial period is completed, you need to purchase a license. Go to http://www.powershrink.com