How to compress PowerPoint files

So, you’ve just written the best presentation of your life. Actually it’s more than a presentation, let’s be honest now, it’s a work of art. With all those carefully chosen photographs, perfect graphs and few humorous quotes chucked in for good measure, you couldn’t be more proud of your work. You can’t wait to email it to your boss, you hit the send button triumphantly, but your glorious moment is rudely interrupted by your email bouncing back because, well, put simply your presentation is massive! Literally ginormous. So not only are you unable to share your masterpiece but you realise that you can’t upload the file either and the performance of your slides is being affected too.

Large images or media files are often the reason for oversized PowerPoint's. But don’t worry, you don’t need to take all your images out of your presentation. I’ve laid out  couple of ways for you to combat these issues, so you never have to worry about your masterpiece being oversized again!

Manual Compression using ‘Compress Pictures’ in PowerPoint

Hiding inside PowerPoint itself is a neat feature to help you keep your file size under control. You can manually compress your presentation using the built in ‘Compress Pictures’ function. Using this you can either compress individual pictures or all the pictures in your presentation at once - here’s how it works.

Step 1: Save a copy of your file - this way if anything goes wrong you still have your original file safe.

Step 2: Open up the copied presentation and find one of the pictures (any picture will do) and left-click on it. This will bring up the Picture Tools menu in the ribbon at the top of your window. Click on ‘Format’ directly below ‘Picture Tools’ - highlighted below.

Step 3: Click on the ‘Compress Pictures’ button in the Ribbon - highlighted in the picture below to open up the Compress Picture options dialog:

Step 4: In the Compress Pictures options:

• Uncheck Apply only to this picture

• Check Delete cropped areas of pictures

• Select the Target output you need (e.g. 150 ppi)

Click OK

Step 5: Save your file and you’re done!  Your file should be considerably smaller and ready to email or upload.

Automatic PowerPoint Compression with NXPowerLite

If the manual compress pictures approach seems like a little too much effort then NXPowerLite could be just what you need. Among its many talents it can automatically compress PowerPoint files as you email them - now it doesn’t get much easier than that!

Key benefits of NXPowerLite over ‘Compress Pictures’

1. Files are made drastically smaller due to our more powerful image compression coupled with the ability to compress other file elements.

2. It’s superpowers aren’t just restricted to PowerPoint, NXPowerLite can shrink your Word, Excel, PDF & JPEG files too.

3. A handy time-saving Outlook integration automatically compress emails as you send them, meaning you don’t even have to think about manual compression!

Sound good? We think so. Have a peek at NXPowerLite Desktop and take it for a spin with a free 14-day trial.