Have you ever had to send or store a huge power point, word, or publisher file? You have probably been in a situation  before where you needed to send someone a file with many pictures, but the file size was just too big.

This happened to me a couple weeks ago, sending a powerpoint to a friend. The powerpoint had about ten pictures that I had taken straight off of my camera, so the total file size exceeded 30MB. Even uploading it to DivShare was slow and painful. So what is the solution? I found it a couple days later at Digital Inspiration.

1. Click the Compress Picture button (available in Picture Tools Format ribbon of PowerPoint 2007) and select "Options". Now choose Email (96 ppi) as the target output and click OK. This should change all the pictures used in your Presentation to an optimal size. 

 

This article lists a couple ways to shrink the file size, but realistically,#1 will likely do the trick. Basically, it involves using a hidden (or at least not well-known) feature in MS office that allows you to compress pictures in the documents. However large the actual image is displayed, the entire size of the image will remain in the document. So even if you take a big picture and just use it as a small thumbnail, its the same file size as if it was blown up. Usually however, you don't need this. Depending on your quality restrictions, you can reduce the file size by 1000-5000% by compressing the image into small print or email quality.

Reduce the File Size of PowerPoint Presentations [Digital Inspiration]