A client of mine is a doctor who often gives slide shows in Powerpoint. He needs to be able to see all his slides for a given year, from many separate shows, in order to choose slides for an upcoming show. What this means is, combining all his slides into one huge file, containing over 1000 slides - a file that would take forever to open each time. He doesn’t need to see the individual slides on the screen, only the “slide sorter” mode, or some other way of showing thumbnails. So is there any way to minimize the size of this huge file, so he can go through it and choose the slides he wants?
Name them informativly, sort them into folders, and burn them on a reburnable CD. If on windows, browse the CD in Explorer with the folder options set to “view thumbnails” or “image folder” or similar?
Are you using Windows PPT or Mac PPT? I ask b/c in Mac PPT there is a feature called Slide Finder that will solve this problem easily. Go to Insert | Slides From File, choose the PPT file you want to see and click “Select Slides to Insert” This will open a dialog that displays the thumbnails from all slides in that file w/o actually loading the file into PPT. You can pick and choose which slides you want to use and insert only those into your new presentation.
Windows PPT does not have this feature. (Don’t ask me why, I’m a Mac PPT Dev :)).
The problem with Iteki’s method is that Explorer will only display the first slide’s thumbnail, not all of them in that PPT file, so I don’t think that will work for him.
My only sugegstion is to create a thumbnail image file. Copy each slide from Slide Sorter view, paste it into a new blank slide until you have 20 or so thumbnails on that slide, then insert a new slides and continue. Once that file has all the thumbnails in it, export it as JPEGs. (File | Save As | JPEG). Our JPEG compression is quite good, so this will get the size down. If he is handy with VB, he could use Macro Recorder to do this with one file, then use that macro on the rest. Or he could use VBE to have this done programmatically.