An extremely important aspect of creating presentations is optimizing them for file size. We use presentations in a variety of circumstances - at business meetings, events, webinars or by sending them by email. Thus, their weight (lightness), ease of sharing and convenience in displaying them on different devices become crucial.
When clients commission me to create a new corporate presentation, they often give me existing materials as a reference. Many times these materials are completely unoptimized in terms of file size. The PowerPoint or PDF files I receive often exceed 20 MB, making them too large for emailing and requiring alternative delivery methods such as WeTransfer, Google Drive or One Drive.
Given that the presentation is often the main sales tool, I find it hard to imagine the "gymnastics" involved in sending such a presentation to a customer every time. If this is also the case in your company, it is worth changing.
A smaller presentation is not only more convenient for your Sales Team, but most importantly, it will shorten the process on the customer side, who from now on will be able to simply open the attachment in the email, instead of opening another browser window, downloading the file and opening it on the computer.
In my practice, presentations usually do not exceed 5 MB, which is made possible by applying several key optimization techniques:
Optimize image sizes
It is the images that have the biggest impact on file size. Fonts, a colored background or a small illustration are nothing compared to a photo that takes up an entire slide.
Only add already optimized images to your Power Point / Google Slides file. If an image takes up an entire 1920 px x 1080 px slide, there is no point in adding an image that is 4000 px x 4000 px and 300 dpi (which is the resolution for printing). Power Point, of course, gives us the ability to resize the image (crop), but does not allow us to change its resolution.
Adding large files to a presentation affects the weight of the file, as well as the speed of opening the file and editing it.
Add image files in appropriate formats
Also pay attention to the file format:
- For photos, choose files .jpg. This format will maintain good image quality and the smallest file size.
- If you need a photo with a transparent background, then add the file .png
- Adding icons, select files .svg (They weigh almost nothing and are razor-sharp; in addition, the icon added in the format of the .svg will enable you to change its color)
- Also add vector files like logos and illustrations as .svg
Compress images
If you have already added slightly too large and unoptimized image files before, PowerPoint rushes to help. PP offers an image compression tool that is capable of reducing the file by as much as 90%.
To perform compression, select:
File > Compress images Setting the option "150 ppi screen display". is the best option if you email files and present them at meetings on a projector.
You may encounter a situation where some graphics will turn into white rectangles after compression. To avoid this, you can select each image one by one and choose "only selected images" in the context window. By doing this step by step, you will avoid compression errors.
Get your slide pattern in order
Each Power Point presentation consists of a presentation file with a slide template - that is, a template based on which it was created.
Adding multiple images in a slide template affects the final file size. Even if you don't use slides that contain photos in a given presentation, the final file will be large.
If we have such a situation and want to reduce the file size, it is a good idea to remove from the slide template those slides that are not used in the presentation. To do this go to:
View > Pattern > Slide Pattern.Then select the slides you don't need and delete them. Finally, click the "Close pattern" button.
Compress PDF files
Often, we don't want to send an open file in Power and Point for a client, and we exprt it to PDF before sending it. Even the best-optimized presentation can sometimes be too large (especially if it contains a lot of high ic quality images).
In this situation, we can subject our file to one more compression - on the output.
You can subject the .pdf file to additional compression, such as in Adobe Acrobat. You can also do this with this online tool >
With the above steps, it is possible to reduce the size of the presentation file without losing the quality of graphics and content. This, in turn, translates into easier uploading, editing on different devices and a better audience experience during the presentation.
