Tech Forum

Hey, I'm wanting to upload the PowerPoint regarding the vision of FamilySearch Wiki, but just remembered our 10M filesize limit. The original is 15,400K. Even zipped, the file was still 8,974k. I heard of some program awhile back that's freeware and will allow people to convert a PowerPoint to a file type that's very compressed and immediately viewable. I don't know if it converts it to Flash or what. Can anyone point me to it? I'm looking for a freeware app so we can develop a best practice that anyone can use.

Three possible options that I can think of are:

(1) Use the "Package for CD" option under "File" in PPT 2003, or Pack and Go in 2000 version. I think that can do the trick.

(2) Save it as a PDF

(3) You can see if PPT will compress your images by going to the image properties and choosing "Compress" in the bottom left of the window.

I'm no PP expert, but in the past I've shrunken other's power points by simply going into the presentation and compressing various images. Typically people will stick very large images into the presentation and the crop or resize them, not realizing that it's only changing the view of the image. The original full image in all it's disk-eating glory is still a part of the final file.

Thanks for reminding me about compressing images; I'd done it once before, but that was years ago. Most of the bloated images in the file were not saved as pictures but as objects, so I couldn't use the Compress Picture feature. The worst images were maps which separate each country of the world into a unique object. I copied these en masse into the freeware IrFanView app and saved them as jpegs, then deleted the originals from the PowerPoint and reinserted the new jpeg images, then redid all the automations. Then I used Compress Picture on all the images in the file at once. Took me about an hour and a half to build the compressed version, whose size shrank from 15M to 1.8M.

Thanks for the ideas! I tried "Package for CD." It didn't actually shrink the file size in any way; it just added a bunch of .dlls and the free PowerPoint viewer. I thought about saving to PDF, but the problem is that this show has LOTS of automations that would get lost if converted to PDF; many of the images wouldn't appear at all. I did do Compress Picture (see below), which helped once I converted all the objects to "pictures."

The disadvantage of PPT would be for those that do not have PPT or the viewer. I think everyone can view a PDF.

You trying to upload the file to these forums or to the wiki?

Tom

RicheyMT was trying to upload the PPT to the Wiki (it is up now and can be viewed at About This Site).