I think we can all feel your pain about e-mailing PowerPoint
presentations... PowerPoint files can get to be huge, especially when you've
pasted a lot of digital photos into the presentation.
Basically, I would say that you're in for a world of hurt if you want to
mail a PowerPoint presentation above several MB in size.
But there are a few things you could try. You could break the presentation
into smaller presentations and mail them separately (!). Or better yet, if
it isn't that important for the presentation to be viewed as a PowerPoint on
the receiving end, you could try printing or saving to PDF. (Note: saving to
the PDF format using the Save command will compress the photos as much as
you'd like.) In fact, I've gotten excellent results saving presentations as
handouts to PDF, but you may need Adobe Acrobat or a similar PDF printer
driver installed. If you have Adobe Acrobat installed, from the PowerPoint
menu select File > Print, change the printer to Adobe PDF, change the Print
What in the Print dialog to Slides or Handouts, and click OK to output the
PDF to the filename you select. When I outputted a presentation that had a
single 1.5 MB digital photo inserted to PDF this way, I got a resulting file
of a mere 84 KB... a massive reduction in file size. So if you're not using
animations in your presentation and you don't care whether it is viewed in
PowerPoint or not, this could be a life-saver for you. In fact, if you have
Acrobat installed (not Adobe Reader, but the full version of Acrobat), you
can set PDFs to be viewed in full screen mode on open, sort of in a slide
show style. But that's a different topic.
Bottom line for pictures or photos placed in PowerPoint: edit 'em to be as
small data-wise as possible while still maintaining clarity and quality,
BEFORE inserting them into PowerPoint. A PowerPoint with 50 photos at 50KB
each in size will still be smaller than a PowerPoint with only 10 photos at
1MB in size. Try to avoid inserting directly from your digital camera (via
iPhoto, for instance) to PowerPoint if at all possible. It takes a little
forethought and a little more work up front, but you will thank yourself at
the end.
Jeff Chapman
