Business Tools Blog

It was late Saturday night when I received this email from Matt Erickson,

“I’m going to be sending you a series of powerpoint presos later tonight. There are Nine sections of appendix (had to break up due to file size) + a overview preso. Let me know if you have any ?s.”

Each email had a ~10meg powerpoint file, with beautiful maps, like the one below.  But who wants to open 9 files? 

After combining the 9 PowerPoint files back into a single 70 meg presentation, I was able to compress the file using the compress picture command (standard with PowerPoint)

Step 1 - Click on the picture to bring up the Picture toolbar

Step 2- Click the compress picture button

Step 3 - On the Compress Pictures menu:

• Apply to: All pictures in document
• Change resolution: Web/Screen
• Options: Compress pictures and Delete cropped areas of pictures
• Click OK

When the command finishes, you can save the file at a fraction of it’s prior size.  In this case we had 100+ maps in a 70 Meg file.  After the Compress Picture command finished, the file was only 12 Meg.

Unfortunately, I still needed to get the file size under 10 Meg, so the next step was to convert the file into a pdf and compress it.

Step 1 - Use Snagit to convert files to pdf.  Just use your normal print menu and select SnagIt as the printer.

 
After the file has printed to SnagIt, save the file as a pdf

Step 2 - Download Cvision PDFCompressor Desktop Evaluation  (it’s free)

Step 3 - Launch CVista’s Quick Run Wizard

• Select Compression Wizard

•  Select individual file

• Select the Source File (the file you want to compress) and the Destination File (where you want the compressed file saved), then click Next

• Select Web Optimization and Region Based Compression, click next

• Click Run Job

After this step, the original 70 meg file has been compressed to 4 meg. Success!