Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

We’ve published several tips over the years about how to make your PowerPoint presentation smaller. Balesio’s PPTminimizer v 3.0 ($29.95, $9.95 upgrade from version 2.0, www.pptminimizer.com) offers a one-step utility to reduce the size of even the most graphics-laden presentation. Best of all, you can reduce the size of your presentation without having PowerPoint: just launch the program, specify the presentation(s) you want to compress, designate the destination, and click a button.

Rather than craft a test presentation file, we chose several presentations vendors used in their demonstrations to us over the last 6 months. We think it’s better to use “real world” files than those crafted to see just how well the program can do. Vendor slide shows tend to be graphics rich.

The program’s settings let you choose one of three compression levels (low for best printed results, standard for screen presentations, and strong for distributing the file via e-mail on posting on the Web). While PPTminimizer claims it can reduce file sizes by up to 96 percent, we didn’t achieve that. However, in every case, compression exceeded 50 percent for standard and strong compressions. Our largest test file, at 3.28 MB, was squeezed down to 1.91 MB (low compression, a 41.6 percent reduction), 1.55 MB (standard, 52.5 percent smaller), and 1.30 MB (strong, 60.4 percent savings).

We were very pleased with the quality of the compression. We found that, just as Balesio says, the standard compression level offered the best combination of smaller size and good graphics resolution. In fact, we’d be hard pressed to find significant, noticeable differences between the “before” and “after” versions of files run through PPTminimizer. We couldn’t detect any quality difference, especially in all the small “logo” graphic files that pervaded our test slides. All appeared to the naked eye as good as the originals.

You can also specify the compression level of JPEG images and optionally optimize PowerPoint attachments. In addition, you can add text to the beginning or end of a file name (it adds “PPTminimizer” to the end of files by default).

At the end of the optimization process you can view the compressed presentation, send it via e-mail, or delete it. We liked the ability to queue up several files, then convert them in one fell swoop. You can also invoke the utility from the File menu; the installation program adds a menu command in PowerPoint 2002 and 2003. It can work on PPS (slide show) files in addition to PPT files. During setup you can install an Outlook add-in that will compact PPT files before you send them, a feature we did not test.

PPTminimizer was smart enough to recognize that we’d embedded an Excel file into one of our test samples, and offered to “flatten” it -- that is, convert it from an embedded Excel chart to an image. For us, that option for presentation files that we will share with others was a good idea. Furthermore, we saved the files as new files in a separate directory rather than overwriting them with the compressed version. We kept the original (full-size) presentation unchanged so we could edit it later. While you can edit the compressed slide show (PPTminimizer creates a PPT file, not some special format you must use an add-in to view), we wanted the true fidelity of the original always available, and compressing the file takes less than a minute anyway.

The program supports PowerPoint 2007 files, and its interface supports English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese and works with Vista according to the company (we tested using Windows XP).

The company offers 12 free conversions from a fully-functional evaluation version you can download at www.PPTminimizer.com/eng/download.htm.

^ Top of page ^

If you like this newsletter, share the free edition with your friends and co-workers. Just point them to:

^ Top of page ^