A little trick to make your presentation document smaller

Presentation documents have become an essential part of our work life and our mailboxes are typically filled and even clogged with messages containing presentations. Some of these attachments are unnecessarily big and there is something very simple you can do to make them smaller. Here is what I found.

I was working on a presentation which had already gone through the hands of a couple of my colleagues when I noticed it contained 40 master slides, or templates, while only 3 of them were used and most of the others were just duplications.

From what I understand this typically happens when you paste in slides copied from other presentations. Usually what happens then is the software paste the slide in along with its template to ensure it remains unchanged. Given how common it is to develop presentations by pulling slides from different sources this can quickly lead to a situation with many templates, not always different.

I went on to delete all the useless copies I had in my document and saved the file to discover that its size had gone from 1.6MB to a mere 800KB. Even though disk space and bandwidth is getting cheaper every day I think anybody will agree that a 50% size reduction remains significant!

So, here, you have it. Tip of the day: To make your presentation file smaller and avoid clogging your colleagues mailbox unnecessarily, check the master view of your presentation and consolidate your templates.

Of course the actual size reduction you’ll get depends on your file. In this case the presentation contains about 20 slides, with only 3 slides including graphics.

For what it’s worth I experimented both with ODF and PPT using Lotus Symphony, as well as with PPT using Microsoft Powerpoint 2003 and the results were similar in all cases.