PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Optimizing Presentations

Optimization in PowerPoint means keeping file size as small as possible. If you plan to display your presentation on a laptop or email it to each of your department heads for sign-off, you should pare down the size of your PowerPoint file by applying the strategies outlined in the following sections.

Choose Insert over Dragging or Pasting

PowerPoint gives you a variety of ways to add pictures, spreadsheets, and other objects to your slides. But the tidiest approach is the Insert tab. Using the Insert options to add an object to a slide can save you big bytes over adding that same object by dragging or cutting and pasting it from another program.

Recycle Your Images

In PowerPoint as in life, reusing makes good sense: for the file size cost of a single image, you can display the image dozens of times—or more. To get the benefit of recycling, add images to your slide master (Section 5.4) instead of adding them to individual slides. Reusing the same graphic on multiple slides doesn't just keep file size to a minimum, it also makes good sense design-wise.

Get Rid of Invisible Stuff

If you edit your slides a lot—adding and deleting objects, for example, or changing your objects' color or transparency—you could end up with objects on your slides that don't actually appear, either because you've accidentally hidden then behind a larger object, because you've made them transparent or the same color as your slide's background, or because you turned off their visibility ...