Imagine this – it’s late at night and you’re finishing up your last few slides for your big presentation tomorrow. You’ve done your final check and your pitch deck is all ready to be sent out. You are finally satisfied with how it looks and click the send button.
To your horror, the email bounces back.
Why? Large attachments are one of the most common causes for bounced emails that never reach their intended recipient. These huge files can cause difficulties in sending out emails or even online uploading in a tense, urgent situation. Especially in corporate organizations, email filters tend to block large attachments for security’s sake. More than 80% of the time, the cause of the file-bulk are the large images that you insert in PowerPoint or your export format of choice.
“But… if I don’t include images, my presentation is going to look boring and ugly”
You’re not wrong there. We encourage our clients and even presentation skills training learners to use more visuals and images in their presentations. If you still want to include some images to ensure your presentation design looks great, what do you do? Worse, in plenty of PowerPoint training courses in the market, few actually teach you different ways to compress your PowerPoint files before sending as an attachment via email or only cover it on Windows or OSX.
Fear not, here’s how you can reduce the size of your PowerPoint file and save space.
This also ensures that your presentation/PowerPoint files reach their intended recipient.
How to Compress PowerPoint (.PPT) Files On Apple OSX Machines
HOW TO COMPRESS POWERPOINT ON MAC OSX
Method One : Compressing All photos on PowerPoint
More often than not, PowerPoint balloons in size because of the high-resolution stock photography that you might include in your presentation. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to quickly compress these files across the whole file or singular files in PowerPoint.
How To Compress All Photos/Images On PowerPoint
Step 1: On the file menu, click “reduce compress pictures”
Step 2: Select your compression size according to the table”
Unless you’re intending to print the PowerPoint file, you shouldn’t have photos sized at 220ppi. We’ve found that the best setting in most cases is 150ppi – such that it preserves minimal quality for use. If you’re really in the need of smaller sizes, using 96ppi is your last resort.
Step 3: Select ‘Delete Cropped Area’
Step 4: Choose “all pictures in this file” and Click “Ok” ‘
You’ll have the option to either compress all images or only selected ones. If you have critical images that cannot be downsampled, choose the latter.
HOW TO COMPRESS POWERPOINT ON MAC OSX
Method Two : Using Picture Format
A more surgical selection of which pictures you’d like to resize in your PowerPoint Presentation. Do note that this is, in fact, the same method of compressing the images but gives you more control as to which photos you want to compress and leave the ones you don’t want to in higher resolution.
How To Compress PowerPoint using picture format
2. Click on the Adjust button
3. Select Compress Pictures
4. Select your compression size according to the table
5. Select “delete cropped area”
6. Choose “all pictures in this file”
7. Click “Ok”
HOW TO COMPRESS POWERPOINT ON MAC OSX
Method Three : Compressing Images Before Inserting into PowerPoint To Preserve Small Size
A more surgical selection of which pictures you’d like to resize in your PowerPoint Presentation. Do note that this is, in fact, the same method of compressing the images but gives you more control as to which photos you want to compress and leave the ones you don’t want to in higher resolution.
Image Compression Method 1: Reduce the size of images losslessly using browser applications
Tools like Tinyjpeg, Tinypng and Smallpdf are great to reduce the size of your files without installing any additional applications on your machine.
Image Compression Method 2: Optimize the dimensions of your presentation images before inserting into PowerPoint
This step is most commonly overlooked by most executives simply because it’s pretty tedious. It involves ‘pre-cropping’ the images you plan to insert into your presentation even before you try any of the methods before this. a) The first step is to determine the max dimensions of your slide. You can do this by accessing the ‘slide size’ in the ‘design’ tab.
b) Enter ‘Page Setup’ when navigating into ‘Slide Size’ to identify the dimensions of each slide. If you’re using any of the typical slide dimensions like Standard (4:3) or Widescreen (16:9), typically the safe dimension is 1024px x 768px and 1280px 720px respectively. c) The very next step is to start cropping the images to fit within the slide dimensions. For example, if your image is 3000px x 2000px, cropping it down to size will save you a lot of space. Using sites like https://imageresize.org/, you can quickly resize images to fit your slide canvas. At the same time, if you’re using raster editing programs like Adobe Photoshop, you can easily reduce the dimensions of your images before saving. Otherwise, site-based tools work too.
HOW TO COMPRESS POWERPOINT ON MAC OSX
Method Four : Zipping Up Files To Compress Size Of PowerPoint
This method is best performed at the end and works regardless of whether you actually compressed the images prior or not. It doesn’t do much other than reduce the size of the single file or a combination of files in a .zip package to send via email.
How To Compress PowerPoint by zipping the file
Step 1: Right-click on selected PowerPoint file and select ‘Compress’
Step 2: You should see a ‘.zip’ file created in the location
Just like that, your file archive is ready to be sent out! Not a Mac user? Fret not! While we do most of our work on MacBooks, we occasionally use other laptops under the Windows operating system as well. For Windows users, the way to reduce file size for Powerpoint presentations can be a little different but follow the steps below and you’re on your way.
How to Compress PowerPoint Files (.PPT) On Windows OS Machines
PowerPoint was developed originally mainly for Windows users – it’s no surprise that many Windows users are also looking to compress their presentations and may run into brick walls during the process.
HOW TO COMPRESS POWERPOINT ON WINDOWS OS
Method One : Compress Images In Picture Format
The approach here to compress your PowerPoint file is very similar to the way it’s done in Mac where you can compress all the images in PowerPoint files with just a few clicks.
How To Compress windows powerpoint using picture format
1. Select an image or picture in the slides
2. Click the Picture Tools tab on the top ribbon
3. Next, select the Format tab
4. Under the adjust segment, click on the Compress icon
5. Select your preferred compression size
6. Select “delete cropped area”
7. Choose “all pictures in this file”
8. Click “Ok”
That’s it! Notice the big difference in size? Now, you’ll be able to send out the emails without worrying about large attachments bogging you down. These handy ways to cut down on file size have been a lifesaver for us at work, and we surely hope they’ll be helpful for you as well. Let us know if you have discovered other methods in the comments section below!
