If you put a lot of images in your PowerPoints (as you should), you will have the problem of what to do with them when it is time to send them to your conference organizer. Do you email them as attachments? Maybe they are too big. How about Zip’ing them? Then your recipient has to unzip them. Here is a quick solution that seems to work well: use File Minimizer from Balesio AG. The software costs $45 and converts images and other objects in your slide deck (and also works with other Office formats) but keeps it a native Office file, so there is no conversion on the other end. I got a 10 MB PPT down to 2 MB, with no discernible loss of graphic quality. The storage of another slide deck was cut in half. Worth checking out.
Thanks for the tip David.
Zipping usually doesn’t help with PPT’s and so such a tool sounds quite useful.
The reason PPT’s with images get so big is that most people simply cut-and-paste – which in MS-Offices uses large image formats. However, if one takes the time to save the images into medium resolution JPEGs (good enough for most presentations), then the whole presentation size can be cut usually to under a meg (depending on number of images, etc. Admittedly that takes more time, so having a tool to blitz through that would be useful.