It has surely happened to you that you have made a very important presentation in PowerPoint for an early meeting and you need to send it by mail.
When the presentation is perfect and you are ready to send it notes that you cannot do it because the presentation weighs a ton. Fortunately, it is a problem that has a solution and there are ways to compress a file with images in a PowerPoint presentation.
Do not allow your PowerPoint presentation to exceed the maximum size allowed for mailing or even uploading to a web page or the cloud. You can reduce the size of the images on your slides and even considerably reduce the size of the presentation without affecting the quality.
How to compress an image in PowerPoint?
The most practical way to reduce the size of a file in your application is to reduce the size of the images on your slides.
- Select the image you want to compress
- Selecting the image brings up a new option on the ribbon called the Image Tool. Click on it and display the new options.
- Select the Compress Images option.
- A new window opens with options. Select the type of resolution you want to apply to the image. You can choose from the highest, 330 dpi HD, 220 dpi print, 150 dpi web and 96 dpi email.
- Select compression options for images. You can choose to remove the cropped areas of the images and if you want to apply the changes to all the images or only to the selected one.
- Finally, press the OK button to save the changes.
From the same window, you can save the configuration you made as the default. In case you want to do the same with other PowerPoint presentations in the future. The only problem with applying this setting is that you cannot know how much the final size reduction is until you save the file again.
Note: You can see the size of a PowerPoint file from the File menu (Alt + A) in the Information tab. The file must be saved to see the file size.
Compress a file with multimedia content in PowerPoint
PowerPoint allows you to reduce the size of multimedia content from version 2010 onwards.
- Depending on the version you use, you can find the Compress media option in the File menu in the Information tab.
- Click the Compress Media button.
- There are three options available to modify the quality of the multimedia content in your presentation. The available options are: Presentation Quality, Internet Quality, and Low Quality. Select one of them.
- The change after selecting an option is immediate and may take time depending on the amount of multimedia files in the presentation.
The reduction in the size of the final PowerPoint file is considerable, but it must be taken into account that the quality of the images, videos or audio can be compromised with this process. It will depend on the quality selected.
Link multimedia content and videos to the presentation
Another way to avoid overloading the presentation and making it lighter is by adding links to the files on the slides, but without embedding them. For example, if you want to link a video into a PowerPoint file:
- Create a text on the slide. It can be video so that it is related to the file we want to link.
- In the Insert menu select the option Link – Insert link.
- Then, in the file browser, select the video you want to reference in the presentation.
- To save the changes press the accept button.
Now when you want to access the file that you just linked, click on the text in the presentation and the file will open with the application that is the default for that format.
Note: for the file to open it has to be in the same location on the storage unit where you linked it. In case you use the presentation on another PC, make sure to upload the multimedia file as well and verify that the link works.