In the final article of this series, I will briefly go over three additional options that could help keep your file sizes down on your PowerPoint Presentations.

• Turning off the Auto Save feature
• Embedding only the characters used in the presentation
• Compressing images

Although having the Auto Save feature turned on can definitely be a very large help, it unfortunately can eat up a lot of disk space. By turning this feature off you can see the size of your file reduce drastically. To turn off this feature you will need to open the Options dialog which can be found under the Tools menu. Select the Save tab and uncheck the box “Allow fast saves”.

Some of you may not want to sacrifice this feature because it can be very useful. Using this option is based on personal preference. I suggest training yourself to automatically save often. Everytime you take a pause after making edits, make it a habit to press Ctrl + S (Cmd + S on a Mac). Once you do this often enough, you will find that it comes natural.

Another option that can be found on the Save tab of the Options window are font options. At the bottom you have the option to Embed TrueType fonts. By selecting to embed only the characters in use by the presentation, you are choosing to embed only a small fraction of the characters and symbols available to a font set. If you are only embedding this small fraction, then your file doesn’t require as much disk space.

In Part 1 we discussed reducing image sizes using a photo editor. This method was to reduce the physical dimensions of the image. One thing to keep in mind is resolution. Resolution is the quality of the image based on the number of pixels within a square inch. The more pixels in a square inch, the higher the quality.

Typical resolution for viewing on-screen is 72. This means that within a square inch on your monitor, there are only 72 dots compacted together to create the image. This is helpful to keep in mind when building web pages and items that will only be viewed on-screen because the file size is very small and easy to email. The recommended minimum resolution for printing is 150 for a low-quality print and 300 is ideal for a magazine or photo quality print, but the file size is much larger.

So what is the significance of this information? When we reduced the dimensions of the image in the previous article, we did not change the resolution. If the original image resolution was 200 dpi, then the resulting image resolution is still 200 dpi. In PowerPoint you can compress the images which reduces the resolution. You have the ability to change the resolution to PowerPoint’s print standard of 200 dpi, which still allows for a quality print out, or reduce it to the Web/Screen preset of 96 dpi, which reduces the file size drastically, especially when applied to all images.

Keep in mind that this option only changes the resolution and not the dimensions. If you change both the dimensions and the resolution, the result will be a greater reduction in overall file size.

Hopefully combinations in the various tips will be helpful in keeping your file sizes small and allow you to email the PowerPoint file for reviewing and editing as necessary.

<< Part 1 << Part 2