Technologist For Hire

So I am currently an IT professional for a company in the Midwest. Just like any large company, there are plenty of presentations where Power Point is the main visual. We have a graphic design department for our advertising. They maintain a large database of images, logos, photos, flyers, etc. They have a total hard-on for ultra-high-res images. I respect the idea, and the proper uses, of high-res imagery! There is one problem though: they don’t believe in compression. I LOVE compression. I love being able to compress server logs by a factor of 88%, or compressing a jpg from 3.4MB to a wimpy, yet still usable 45KB. The Power Point presentations that are generated here contain 10-50 images, all in their 10 mega pixel glory, along with transitions, lame type-writer effects, and horrendous page backgrounds.

After the presentations are created, the users attempt to send it to people inside and outside of the company. They quickly receive a “Mailbox is over its size limit, or you are trying to be a dumb ass and send a 91MB Power Point presentation to someone”.

They then call me and yell at me for putting limits on their email. I try to explain to them how stupid sending a 91MB Power Point presentation is, but they wont listen. So I grab it off the network drive and work magic on it. I quickly turn that 91MB Power Point into a 7.2MB Power Point, which is the EXACT same quality on screen and in print.

Here is how:

1. Step1:
   Open your gigantic Power Point presentation. The one I am using in this demo is a sexy 33.98MB (35,631,104 Bytes).
2. In Office 2007, click on ANY photo/image in the Power Point Presentation.
   1. Up in the Ribbon (fancy name for Office 2007 Tool Bar), click on the “Format” menu, under “Picture”.
   2. Now click on the “Compress Pictures” option to the left
      
       
   3. Make sure “Apply to selected pictures only” is UNCHECKED (see below)
      
       
   4. Check the top 2 boxes, and select “Screen (150 dpi)” (or, if you are really advantageous and wanna stick it to the MAN, choose “Email (96 dpi)”)
      
       
3. In Office XP/2003, you simply right click the photo, click “Format Picture”, goto the “Picture” tab, in the bottom left of the window, click “Compress” and use the same options as above!

This works in Office XP/2003/2007 in all programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc)

The Power Point presentation used in the example above is now 3.36MB (3,527,168 Bytes).

Enjoy.

Tags: compress, compression, email, high_res_images, how-to, microsoft, office, power_point_presentation

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Informational, how-to, microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.