How to Shrink Your PowerPoint Size By Melissa Zieger

We’ve all seen it happen. The simple PowerPoint that becomes so large you can no longer share it via email unless you PDF it. Which then makes team edits a challenge. Which then means you resort to USB keys and file sharing services and other measures. Which then gets frustrating…quickly.

Fret not, creators of PowerPoint multi-media mayhem, we have some tips that let you keep all that impressive content without creating an inbox traffic jam of epic proportions for your recipients.

Disable Fast Saves/AutoRecover

The concept of fast saves (or AutoRecover, depending on your version of PowerPoint) is great and has rescued many of us from losing content we forgot to save by manually hitting the Save button, But, that convenience add to the overall size of your PowerPoint. To turn this feature off in older versions of PowerPoint, go to the Tools menu, click Options, click the Save tab, and then clear the Allow fast saves check box. This action makes PowerPoint remove excess data from your presentation each time you save. In PowerPoint 2010, go to File, Options, Save and uncheck the AutoRecover option

After you've done this, save your presentation under a new name.

Use the latest format

If you use the new pptx format instead of ppt, you will decrease the size of your PowerPoint presentations automatically. The new PowerPoint format was designed to handle pictures and photos much more effectively than the old format, so it is worth switching.

Compress your images

Compressing your images makes a big impact on file size. PowerPoint 2002 and later can compress images and shrink your file size back down to “normal” proportions.( Most PowerPoint images don't need to be larger than 1024 × 768 pixels anyway.)

Give it a try: right-click your image, then click Format Picture on the shortcut menu. In the Format dialog box, click the Picture tab, and then click Compress. Under Apply to, you have some options:  To compress only the current image, click Selected pictures. To compress all the images in your presentation, click All pictures in document.

If you are using PowerPoint 2007, you can compress all pictures that have been added to your presentation by clicking on Format then Compress Pictures. In addition, if you know your PowerPoint is never going to make it to big screen glory, you can also select Screen or Email in Target output for further shrinking.

For PowerPoint 2010, you can compress all your presentation images by going to File, Options, Advanced, and then ensure “Do not compress images in file” is not checked. Choose the lowest number possible (96 ppi) in “Set default target output to”. 

Hyperlinks

Use hyperlinks to connect to multimedia content instead of embedding it directly in your presentation. This will reduce the size of the presentation.

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