Compressing PowerPoint files with photos

Once again yesterday I saw the power of compressing photos in PowerPoint 2003 (sorry, for those with earlier version this feature isn't in your software). I was working with someone who was doing a presentation for a community group on a recent trip to Africa and almost the entire show was photos the group had taken. They had 66 slides done so far with about 80-90 photos. The PowerPoint file was a whopping 101 MB! This was all due to the photos being imported at the high resolution they were taken. Did you know that a 4 megapixel photo has almost 5 times the number of pixels than a normal screen could ever use? All those extra pixels get stored by PowerPoint but never used, leading to file bloat as I saw in this case. The solution is to double click on one of the photos in the presentation to bring up the Format Picture dialog box. On the Picture tab, click on the Compress button. In the Compress Pictures dialog box that is displayed, select All Pictures in the document and Web/Screen resolution and click OK. If you have many pictures, this operation will take a while, as it did in this case. When it is done, save the file to a new name (this is a quirk of PowerPoint that it does not release the extra space unless the file is saved under a new name). In the presentation I was working with yesterday, it shrunk from 101MB to 5.9MB - a 94% reduction! If you want more information on reducing the size of photos to avoid PowerPoint file bloat, check out my article at http://www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com/articles/better_images.htm . It includes reference to a utility that will work for those with earlier PowerPoint versions.