TECH TIP: Keeping PowerPoint presentations lean

What follows is something I wrote up for and emailed to all our staff in Asia just yesterday. I hope this is helpful to you as well!...

Smaller pictures = Smaller PowerPoint files = Benefits

PowerPoint files are often overly large in size because the PICTURES embedded in them are much larger than they need to be. In most cases, reducing picture sizes results in PowerPoint files that are 50-75% smaller than the originals (e.g. 30MB => 9MB). Benefits of smaller PowerPoint files include faster emailing, uploading, downloading, printing, playback, and saving of your presentations.

Pictures too big?

You can tell if you should reduce the size of a picture if, when you insert it into PowerPoint, it extends way beyond the boundaries of the slide. Or you find yourself scaling down pictures more than 10% (scaled picture is less than 90% of original size). (Often, the large pictures are photos taken from digital cameras.) Generally, no picture's file size for PowerPoint should be larger than around 300KB.

You should resize your pictures down (reduce their resolution) to get rid of excess data while maintaining adequate detail and clarity. Your pictures must be resized before inserting them into PowerPoint. If your pictures are already in PowerPoint you're going to have to resize the original pictures and then reinsert the resized pictures — sorry!

Use Resize! to downsize your JPEG pictures

If your pictures are in JPEG format (most are), you can use a free software called "Resize!" (PC and Mac versions available) to resize your pictures. Download it here:

  http://mapage.noos.fr/cedricdj/re.html

(Much thanks to Cedric of KStudio for creating such a helpful program and releasing it for free!)

Basically, here's how you use the software:

1. COPY all your pictures into a folder on your desktop
   
2. DRAG the folder (must be a folder, not a file) onto the Resize! icon
   
3. The Resize! window pops up. In the empty field ("Size wanted _____ Biggest (pixel)") ENTER a number based on the Size Guidelines below

   Size Guidelines:
     Full page picture = 700
     3/4 page picture = 550
     1/2 page picture = 500
     1/4 page picture = 420
     1/8 page picture = 300
     smaller picture = less!

4. Then just CLICK the "Go!" button at the bottom
   
5. LOOK on your desktop for a folder starting with the same name as the original but with (Bxxx) appended (xxx = the number you entered). Your resized pictures will be in that new folder (Resize! never modifies any of the originals).

   Example:
     pictures  <= name of original folder
     pictures (B500)  <= name of new folder if you entered 500 in step 3

After you resize your pictures, insert them into your PowerPoint presentation and if quality isn't good enough, increase number by 50-100. If size can be smaller, reduce number by 50-100.

You can quickly resize your pictures at various sizes all at once by repeatedly entering in different numbers (e.g. 420, 500, 550, 700) and clicking Go!. This helps speed up the process of getting just the right size for all your pictures. When inserting pictures into PowerPoint, if the picture is too small or too big, just navigate to the appropriate folder and insert another size till it's right:

Desktop
    |----- pictures (B420)
    |----- pictures (B500)
    |----- pictures (B550)
    |----- pictures (B700)

If you're finding that you're losing too much picture detail or sharpness, I've found that inserting the picture at a size that's 10-15% larger than you actually want it to appear, then scaling it down in PowerPoint gives you that higher quality picture. In the Resize! program, you can also try increasing the JPEG Quality setting (default is 80 out of 100).

Another thing: I emailed my tech tip to most of the IT managers in our multinational company, BBDO, and Franklin from our Pages/BBDO office in the Dominican Republic had this to add:

We encourage our executives to do the following, after the presentation has been made, the first thing we do is go to One picture in Powerpoint and select picture properties and select COMPRESS and CROP ALL pictures, and powerpoint will convert all pictures in documents to 72 dpi and crop pic areas. This is Powerpoint XP only and will lean the PPT a lot depending on Picture usage.

We're still using PowerPoint 2000 in most of Asia but when we do purchase Office XP, we'll be sure to take advantage of that new feature.

Marcin Gos of our NoS/BBDO Warszawa office in Poland also offered these helpful tips and links:

For optimizing of existing presentarions on pre-XP Powerpoint there's 99$ RnR Presentation Optimizer http://www.rdpslides.com/pptools/FAQ00013.htm It's great tool, with many options — it works on pictures, OLE objects, allows you to ungroup charts and sheets... For creating new presentations from jpgs I personally prefer PPTImport — it's cheaper and allows batch inserting of slides (that's the tool that created mentioned earlier 168 slides presentation) http://www.consumerdvreviews.com/pptimport

Linking http://www.powerpointbackgrounds.com/powerpointlinking.htm allows us to use two color templates instead of Powerpoint's one (AFAIK PPT XP allows you to use more templates, but we run PPT 2000 in Account Dept.)

And for Flash movies we use Swiff Player for PowerPoint http://www.globfx.com/products/#swfplayers — it must be installed on the computer that will run the presentation, that's the only small disadvantage, otherwise it runs fine.

Excellent PPT FAQ: http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq and set of useful tools: http://www.rdpslides.com/pptools

Posted by derek at February 14, 2003 09:58 AM