Compress a PowerPoint 2007 Document

Written on March 27, 2010  |  by RP Mickler  |  Leave a Comment Leave a Comment  |  Bookmark and Share

I got a call today from a friend of mine. She was on the road, preparing for a presentation, and the file was too large to upload into Google Docs; Google Docs, it turns out, has a limitation of a 10mb file for conversion. She needed to perform the conversion to complete the presentation to her audience.

More often than not, PowerPoint bloat occurs because of image sizes in the presentation. There’s an easy way to approach this.

In PowerPoint 2007:

  1. Open your PPT file.
  2. Click FILE, SAVE AS.
  3. Click the Tools Drop-Down Menu.
  4. Select the option to Compress Pictures.
  5. In the Compress Pictures Option dialog:
    .

    1. If your goal is to present the presentation on a screen, change the resolution from PRINT to SCREEN. This lowers the DPI to 95 (Dots Per Inch), lowering the size and density of the image.
    2. If your goal is to present the presentation on a screen and printed output, change the resolution to PRINT (200 DPI). This setting will still provide a quality image on paper while reducing its size in the PPTX file.
    3. You want to affect all pictures.
    4. You also want to delete the cropped areas of pictures.
    5. Hit OK.
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  6. Save file to different file name (example: presentation_compressed.pptx)
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What this should do is create a separate file that is much smaller that the first file but still useful for your presentation. It will also make it easier to transfer in email and take up less space on a jump drive. You’ll also notice that – after compression – the file won’t compress much more in a *.zip container. The process compresses the file as much as it can. So give it a whirl, and I hope it helps out.
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R