I teach art history and for a 3 hour lecture (sigh!) I’d average about 120 slides, all decent images, which depending will run between 12 and 40 MB (quicktime movies add to it, and the occasional huge image that I don’t have time to fix). 211 is off the hook.
Thank you both for the stats, it seems clear that the presentations I’ve got here are larger than normal, and the culprit is almost certainly the images. I’m in the process of following the suggestions given above, I’ll let you know how it turns out.
That’s interesting, I never would have thought to check for missing spreadsheet in a PowerPoint! I’ll have to remember that. In this case, though, no spreadsheets, just lots of images and text, and a few linked movies.
If you are making a PP file with only text on an internally-generated graphic or none, the file is very small. If you import a different bitmapped graphic for each slide, they will be stored internally and the file will be quite large.
If you import a single file and set it as a master (compared with duplicating it for each slide), the file shouldn’t be much bigger than a text-only file.
If final file size is important, preprocessing any imported graphic files to the minimum size you need for the quality you want will avoid saving data that is only discarded later anyway.
Yeesh, what an assholish response. Sorry about that - bad day at work yesterday.
How do you make an image the master? I assume this makes that image the default background for all new slides in that presentation?
Correct. Copy the image, then goto View | Master | Slide Master and paste it. Or goto Format | Background in Master view and Apply it there.
You guys are great!
Following the supplied tips, I installed Office 2003, and had it compress and autocrop all the images, turned off Fast Save, and created and applied a master slide to the first of the presentations.
The file size went from 211 MB to 35 MB. That’s a significant difference, especially when you’re trying to put 6 of these things on a CD.
Now that I have new version of Office installed, I can update the other presentations in just a few minutes each.
In the best SDMB style, ignorance fought, knowledge gained, and I get to be the hero today. 
Thanks again.
Hey, no problem. We all have rough days sometimes.
I just finished some testing and the smaller file sizes also mean faster loading, saving, and editing times. For anybody interested or who might be dealing with similar problems, here are some simple figures from my test.
Previously, to load the largest PowerPoint took about 35 seconds on the laptop used most often for PowerPoint development. (It was taking over a minute until I bumped his RAM from 512 MB to 1 GB.)
The new smaller version loads in 6 seconds on the same box.
Previously, with three Powerpoints open, to copy a series of 10 or 15 slides from one PowerPoint into another (where the other is already at 100+ slide range) would take anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds or longer.
With the smaller versions loaded, the copy & paste now takes 3 or 4 seconds max, and is often a second or less.
Now I know waiting an extra 30 seconds here and there won’t kill anyone, but you spend a few hours opening, closing, and copying, and it adds up a little.
But the biggest benefit may be that the frustration level is so much lower when you aren’t waiting 30 seconds each for these fairly common operations. The guy doing these is much happier, and that’s important in many ways.
Amazing what you can do if you use the tools the right way.
Thanks again everybody.
Well put. I wish more people would take the time to learn as you did.