I know there must be many variables, but on average, how big are your PowerPoints?
Over the last year, one of our people has created PowerPoint Presentations to replace the transparencies they used to used for presentations. Many of the slides contain pictures, a few link to video files (avi or mpg). Many are just text on a background. Virtually all the slides use a graphic that covers the entire slide as a background. It’s a kind of stylish color swoop at the top and bottom with the main area of the slide white.
The finished presentations average a little under a megabyte per slide. A 205 slide presentation is about 211 MB. A 180 slide presentation is about 160 MB. There are 10 different presentations that get used in various mixes, depending on the venue. Now I’ve got to burn sets of these things onto discs to hand out to the presenters, and they are not fitting on the CDs very well.
Assuming the slides are stored as bitmaps, I think an 800 x 600x 16 bit color slide would be about a megabyte uncompressed, a 1024 x 768 would be about a meg and a half. But I was expecting some compression.
So, is that about average size, or have they done something odd to make these things huge? And if so, what can I check to make them smaller?
205 slides!? How long is the presentation, three and a half hours?
The rule of thumb I’ve always heard and tried to use is about one minute per slide. My PowerPoint files are seldom more than a couple of megabytes, even with images and complicated animations.
Were these slides created from a lot of different people working on them? I work on Powerpoint slides kept on a sharepoint. I dont know what the hell other people are doing, but something happens with the way the copy/paste or edit or something and it makes the file unnecesarily HUGE! This makes it take forever to load when I need to open it later.
When I notice this happen, I just copy the slides and paste them into a whole knew presentations. Whatever excess useless information was causing the file to be 80MB is not transferred. The file now becomes 7 or 8 MB and easy to work with.
I have no idea what the mechanism of the error is. And these are simple text slides.
Yup - that works. I just tested it with a one slide PowerPoint. I pasted a large .jgp (405KB) image to the slide, and resized the image to fit the page. Total size was 444KB. When I copied that slide to a new PP file, the total size was 280KB. I’m guessing that when you add a large image to a PP, the size of that graphic uses the same amount of space as the original image, regardless of resizing. However, when you copy the slide to a new file, the image size saved is considerably smaller due to the resizing in the first PP.
There is a setting in PowerPoint (and other Microsoft applications) that saves information related to the autosaves and changes made on the file. Thus, even if the change deletes content, the file itself can still grow in size, becausethis information is being saved too. I don’t recall how to turn this off, but maybe someone else can show how.
Also, make sure to use File>Insert>Picture>From File to add pictures instead of just copying and pasting them in. That makes the files larger as well.
Edited to add: Aha, found it. How to turn off fast saves and other tips on reducing file size for PowerPoint presentations.
I use Powerpoint fairly frequently. I don’t insert anything videos or sound, so they are not as large as some may create, but I do fairly commonly insert charts from Excel, or images of whatever description. Even so, my files are no where near as large as the OP mentioned. In an average presentation of 30 or so slides I might, maybe, reach a meg.
Damnit! Finally a GQ I can answer with total authority, and I’m late to the party. ::kicks dirt::
I recommend everything in Steve Rindberg’s link. Also, if you’re stuck with large images and you don’t have a graphics application that can open them and convert to a smaller format, PPT will do it. Insert the images and then graphic export them. File | Save as | JPEG, then reinsert them in this more compressed state. Clunky, but it works.
In addition to the code bloat with Fast Save as already been pointed out, I’m betting very few people optimize each graphic they insert into a slide.
I’ve taken Powerpoint files created by others, and using their original images, optimized each one before rebuilding the presentation. It’s not difficult to take a 100 MB file down to 20-25 MB after optimizing each image.
Ok, so I take it a 211 MB PowerPoint is larger than normal, even for 200 slides.
I’m going to go through the suggestions on the linked page, but I’ve got to update from PowerPoint 2000 to 2003 first.
How do you think the built in compression and resizing in PP 2003 will compare to doing it one image at a time in Photoshop? I don’t really have time to go through 10 Powerpoints and over 1500 slides one at a time. :eek: Plus, I don’t have the original images, only the PowerPoints themselves.
You can export the entire presentation as JPEG, (you’ll be prompted to do so when you Save as JPEG), then resinsert the entire picture folder one graphic each per slide into a new presentation using Jim Gordon’s Add-In (you can find it online). I would wager that would be much faster than using Photoshop one at a time.
Bear in mind this will export the entire slide as a graphic; any container information on slide objects other than graphics will be stripped. (ie. graphs won’t be able to be reedited in MS Graph, etc).
How would this affect slides that have an action (I’m not sure that’s the right term).
For example, he has several slides that initially display a single line of text. Then when you press Page Down, another line appears. There may be for or five lines total, each one appearing on page Down.
Would these be changed by the utility you mention?
Fascinating… For comparison, I just opened up a couple of my Keynote (Mac equivalent of PowerPoint) presentations. The first one is twelve slides, and clocks in at 460 Kb, and the second is 14 slides and 368 Kb. So I’m averaging less than 32K per slide, or about 1/30 of what the OP is reporting. What the heck is Microsoft doing with all those extra bytes, that Apple isn’t?
Because we’re wasting everyone’s time and money because we suck and we’re evil.
Or, perhaps because Keynote has the luxury of not having to reverse engineer internal OpenGL calls to its graphics layer and FrankeLib sound layer and has easier access to QuickTime calls and doesn’t have to retain older and not ideal code to allow for cross platform compatibility with WinPPT files and retain their calls to motion path, custom path, trigger, WinPPT transition, drawlayer, graphic filters, templates, font, OLE, ATSUI, multimedia placeholder and custom layout code.
For a 25 minute talk I would usually have between 20 and 40 slides. Most of my PowerPoint files are under a megabyte; it seems that images are the main contributor to ballooning sizes in mine.
Another possibility: if you have Excel plots in the presentation, it might be putting the entire Excel spreadsheet in the PowerPoint, causing a big size increase. I seem to remember once being able to recover a lost Excel spreadsheet from a PowerPoint because of this.