A senior stakeholder is giving an important presentation and has taken you right to the wire with changes and edits. You add in the final few images, save it, drop it into an email, hit send and… Disaster. The file is too big for the company servers. You need to reduce the file size, and fast.
If you can’t, you have to upload it to a shared file, send them the link, stand over them while they download and save it to their machine… Except now their PowerPoint is running slowly because the file is so huge, and now it’s crashed, and oh God, they’re on stage in five minutes so they have to use the old version and of course it’s All. Your. Fault…
It doesn’t have to be this way.
You can reduce the size of a too-heavy PowerPoint file in a couple of clicks without compromising the quality or deleting any of the content. Here are three pro tips.
Step 1: Delete any unused master slides
Corporate branded PowerPoint decks are often full of image-heavy master slides. However, you can safely delete any you’re not using. Here’s how.
View > Slide Master > In the left-hand panel, select and delete any master slides you’re not using in the deck > Close Master View.
Step 2: Compress the images
You can reduce the resolution of all the images in a deck in as little as four clicks, thereby massively reducing the size.
Picture Format > Compress > Email or Web
Step 3: Delete cropped-out sections of images
Finally, you can delete the unused sections of any cropped images. (These sections aren’t deleted when you crop them in PowerPoint – they’re just rendered invisible).
If you check these boxes, it will apply the changes to the individual image. However, simply uncheck them both to apply these changes right through the deck.
Et voila – in only a few clicks, you’ve massively reduced the size of the deck. The presentation is easy to email, PowerPoint is running smoothly, and your senior stakeholder’s happy. It’s all in a day’s work for an Internal Comms Master.
