Recently, I had a rather desperate e-mail from a reader who had a strange PowerPoint problem. She had created a basic nine-slide presentation with only a few graphics and a little animation. She couldn’t figure out what she did, but the presentation that had been 2 MB, suddenly ballooned up to 59MB. As any veteran PowerPoint user can tell you, the larger a presentation gets, the less stable it becomes. Her presentation had started behaving badly and things weren’t looking good.
A few days before, I had a similar problem with a 200K three-slide presentation that inexplicably expanded to 5MB. I was using PowerPoint 2003, which I haven’t spent much time with. In my case, I saved my presentation back to an earlier version by choosing File|Save As and selecting a different version from the drop-down. PowerPoint gives you a warning message that if you’ve done anything that’s specific to a newer version it will be lost. I hadn’t and I didn’t care. I don’t remember how many versions I went back, but it was several.
I found out later, my solution may have been overkill. Apparently the Fast Saves option, which has annoyed Word users for years also causes bloat problems in PowerPoint. If you have presentation weirdness, you should choose Tool|Options|Save and remove the checkmark next to Fast Saves if it’s there. Then save the presentation with a new name.
As it turned out, the reader had imported a large image into her presentation, so it wasn’t really PowerPoint’s fault that it bloated up. When you work with PowerPoint, you need to think about the images you insert. If the presentation is going to be viewed on screen, no image ever needs to be more than 72 or 96 dpi. You also generally would never have an image with dimensions larger than 1024 x 768, which is the resolution most laptops run at these days.
Those people who just randomly import 5 megapixel digital camera photos without modifying them first are in for a big PowerPoint surprise. You can scale an image in PowerPoint, so it looks small. But if you bring a 40MB image into PowerPoint, it will increase your presentation by at least 40MB no matter how small it looks on the slide. The answer is to use your image editing program to size your images appropriately before adding them into your presentation.
In newer versions of PowerPoint, you also can use PowerPoint’s built-in compression feature to help shrink images (and your presentation size). Just right-click the image and choose Format |AutoShape. Click the Picture tab and press the Compress button. Now change the resolution to Web/Screen and Apply the change to all of the pictures in the presentation. Click OK to save the changes and resave the presentation.