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How to avoid heavy slides that could end up with a 30MB presentation? |
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I just got off the phone with Ulrich, a manager who has to make a presentation to a group of investors within 2 weeks and wanted me to review his slides. His stuff was 34MB heavy! |
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As he also has to communicate his slides to a couple of colleagues and most people are not at the office during these holidays, how to handle this? No way to email a 34-MB file... He uploaded me his presentation through my website and after two hours of work together, as it was quite an emergency, his presentation had shrunk to 4 MB! Still heavy, but we will be using my website for download so that everyone can check the contents tomorrow. A quick conclusion to this intro: it can happen that you don't have a download/upload possibility on the spot. So you'd better pay attention to create light slides and check the MB's while building up your presentation! Too often we end up with large presentations that are either difficult to transfer or take too much disk or mailbox space or might be too slow to load. Why is that? Usually, it's because we import hi-res (high-resolution) pictures from our cameras, or from other presentations. And we don't look at their weight. Our digital cameras now capture digital pictures up to 12 megapixels and phones are competing with them. So we are proud of importing these photos into PowerPoint because of their top definition. Things we shouldn't do. |
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See here on the left how far you can go: it's a 4Ko picture that comes from a hi-res 1.3Mo original! Amazing! Still not useable unless you keep it tiny. |
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→ Why shouldn't you import hi-res pictures? Simply because these nice pictures can overload your presentation and the resolution you like so much is useless for projection.
→ What to do? The bigger the size of your picture on the screen the higher the resolution requirement. The smaller the lower. So you'd better test before importing heavy pictures. Suppose you have the sunset picture I'm using here: it's a jpg that weighs 1.26Mo. Here it is again below, in a reduced screenshot. Now, if you insert it directly into your slide, it keeps its weight. You could use the compressing tools of PowerPoint if you have a version from 2002 above. But I prefer a more interesting and more selective approach. I call it the Swiss knife of picture reduction. It's called Photo Editor, if you use a Microsoft Office version older than 2003. It's called Picture Manager in Office 2003. You access Picture Manager quite easily though Start > All Programs > Microsoft > Microsoft Office Tools > MS Photo Editor. Then you go to Choose File > Open your_file_name. Go then to Picture > Compress Pictures > Web pages. Click OK and save. And wow! you get a compressed image of 64 Ko! Interesting, isn't it? It takes little time and works fantastic. |
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Great Business Presentations / Clarity / How to avoid heavy slides that could end up with a 30MB presentation
This is the enlarged compressed result of 64 Ko. Pretty useable isn't it?
Now you could say: "Well, what you'll get is a poor picture that won't look professional on the screen." --Wrong. It works. Still, if you really prefer a higher resolution, because you intend to use the full screen and you have double-checked the gain, OK then, select the Compress for Documents. But in our example here, it will weigh about 274 Ko. It's OK for printing if you are looking for quality colour printing. By the way, if you want to submit this picture to colleagues, you can compress it to less than 30 Ko. It might be enough also, if you want to use a thumbnail somewhere in a corner of the screen. Of course, here on your PC screen, the resolution difference is quite difficult to identify, but it's a first sign of the unrealism of high-resolution in presentations. What could you do now if you want to test what I'm saying? Take a hi-res picture that you want to use in a presentation. Try out the Picture Manager and import the 3 possible compression schemes, each time on a full screen slide. Compare the 3 slides. You'll see that most of the time web page compression will do the job nicely on a full screen and that the email compression will be satisfactory for a smaller size. Imagine what it does in terms of weight on a large presentation full of pictures!
Mac users: simply use iPhoto to reduce your picture size. Select your picture > Share > Export > File Export > Format: JPG > Scale images no larger than... and reduce the width --try to remove the last digit > Export to desktop > click the picture: you see how much it weighs. Change if necessary. Extremely flexible and easy to do.
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Other articles on CLARITY:
Too much eye candy may overkill some people. Sobriety in your charts pays off.
How to replace dumb lists with a set of smart shapes in minutes
A laser-eye puts you ahead of the crowd
Combine high-contrast colours to make your slide stand out
Create strong headlines on top of all your slides
What kind of title page should you use?
Avoid long text. Why wouldn't you use light illustrations instead?
Trash cheap clip-art and circus-like transitions
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