Presentation Tips: How To Compress Your PowerPoint Presentation

June 13, 2018
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Welcome to a new series here on our blog, where we’ll be sharing practical tips to help you create better presentations. If there’s a specific tip you want to know, drop us a comment below and we’ll make sure to write about it.

One of the most commonly asked questions both online and offline is how to compress a PowerPoint presentation. Here’s how:

Compress your images

Applies To: PowerPoint for Office 365, PowerPoint 2016

Select the image you want to compress. If you want to compress all images, click on any image.Go to the “Format” menu displayed.Select the “Compress” button under “Picture Tools”.

Presentation Tips: How To Compress Your PowerPoint PresentationSelect if you want to compress only the selected image or all images.Select one of the following in the “Picture Quality” box:Print (220 ppi) – For printing purposes;On-screen (150 ppi) – For screen viewing – We recommend going for this option. If you can’t check it, it means your images are below 150 ppi and you need to find higher-quality ones;Email (96 ppi) – For email sending;Click Use original quality – To keep the current resolution of the image/images and minimize changes.

Pro Tip 1:  Resize the image before you insert it into your presentation. If you’re downloading it from a free stock photo website, don’t automatically download the highest resolution. Choose the size you need – for example, if you want to use the image for the full slide, you need to download the 2000×1300 px version, or something close to that. The goal is to get it at the smallest resolution while still retaining a qualitative aspect. If you have a very large image, use an imaging editing tool like Adobe Photoshop to resize it.

Pro Tip 2: If you’ve used the “Crop” function for any of your images, you can further reduce the file size by checking the “Delete cropped areas of pictures” box.

Pro Tip 3: You can also have PowerPoint automatically compress images within any future presentation. Go to File -> Options -> Advanced. Scroll to “Image Size and Quality” and check “Discard editing data”. Choose an appropriate target PPI value, which will be used to downsample any images you add thereafter.

Pro Tip 4: Un-check “Apply only to this image” to speed up the process.

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Compress media (video and audio files)

This is a particularly tricky option because you can only see it if you’ve inserted a large video or audio file, otherwise, the menu does not display it.

To compress large media files, video or audio, follow these steps:

Insert the video/audio file.Open the “File” menu.Click on “Compress media” under the “Info” section. Remember, this will not be displayed if your file does not need compression/is not suitable for it. Presentation Tips: How To Compress Your PowerPoint Presentation

 

Select the quality you want for your media:Full HD (1080 p)HD (720 p)Standard (482 p)Watch the progress bar as PowerPoint compresses your files.

Pro Tip: For videos, you can also choose to upload them online, for example on your YouTube account, and choose the “Online video” option.

Compress the presentation file on your computer

If you’ve already created your presentation and you’re in a hurry, you can compress the presentation file directly.

Compress the PowerPoint file on Mac OS

Select the presentation.Right-click to open the menu.Select “Compress”.

Presentation Tips: How To Compress Your PowerPoint Presentation

Compress the PowerPoint file on Windows OS

Open the folder where you’ve saved the presentation.Right-click on the file and select “Compress” or “Zip”.

Presentation Tips: How To Compress Your PowerPoint Presentation

Use other compression programs/apps

There are many programs and apps that can help reduce the size of presentation files, videos, audio files or images. Here are some options:

NeuxpowerZipArchiverWinZipPeaZip7ZipWecompress

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