How to create PowerPoint templates that work
Without a proper PowerPoint template, presentations can be a bit of a mess. Here are the building blocks for developing a PowerPoint template that works!
Media-rich presentations are great. Including high-quality images and videos often adds hugely to audience engagement, but it also adds file size. Adding to your file size means that your presentation is likely to sit on the unfriendly size of email etiquette, but it also means your PowerPoint will run a lot slower (and it may crash – see this article for more on that). But is there an answer? Absolutely. Here are five ways to compress PowerPoint file size for easy emailing and speedy running of your presentation.
View our tips in this video.
The content from the video can be found in the article below.
Did you know PowerPoint has a built-in picture and video compression tool? Well it does, and it’s really easy to use.
Images:
Videos:
That may do the trick, but sometimes you’ll come across a presentation that stubbornly refuses to yield a decent file size. At this point, you need to get tricksy.
A problem you can face when you need to compress PowerPoint slides is that, often, you don’t know which object is causing your file size to jump so much. It might be that 90% of your media files are a combined total of 5MB, but there’s one troublesome image that is 30MB on its own. Here’s a fool-proof way of finding which files are causing you problems.
For video you’ll likely need to use another tool, so find the video files using the zip method, or extract them using the free BrightSlide PowerPoint add-in (File & Master > Export Media Files), and then use the methods below with the free Handbrake video editing software.
Another tip is to think about the type of image file you’re working with. The three most common are JPEGs, PNGs, and TIFs. JPEGs are the most common. They’re usually slightly lower quality, but it’s often difficult to tell, unless the screen is really good or very large. PNGs provide excellent quality for the size, and also allow you to have transparent areas of your images, but that comes at a cost, with file size usually pretty high. TIF files are often produced by high quality cameras in professional photo shoots. They’re great for print, but overkill in a PowerPoint presentation. So if you’re struggling with the file size on a particular image, try saving it as a JPEG:
The last way to keep your file size low is to make sure you don’t have anything in the file that you don’t actually need. What might this be? Well, it’s things like huge Slide Masters and templates with images and graphics on them that you just won’t ever use. To streamline your PowerPoint file:
Tip 1: Always ‘Save As’ – you might not need those layouts this time, but you might need them in the future.
Tip 2: If you have a number of layouts you don’t use then it might be worth chatting to the team that put the template together to see if they can reduce the number of slides in the interests of keeping file size low.
And all of these tips combined will help you to compress PowerPoint files, resulting in svelte slide decks that you can use and share with ease!
If you want fine detail control over resolution or codecs, or want to remove parts of the video, you’ll need to use a specialist video tool. A terrific one is HandBrake, a free, excellent quality video transcoder that possibly has the best logo and program icon ever. You can use HandBrake to change the format, codec, resolution, frame rate, and bitrate, plus loads more. If that sounds a bit technical, sorry, but the presets are really good. Drag the video file you want to compress into Handbrake, and in the Presets drop-down menu in the top left, choose either Fast 1080p30 or Fast 720p30 (that’s 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second), and then the green Start Encode button at the top. This will often magically reduce file size by up to half, and it takes only a few minutes.
If you’re really keen, you can use the Range options at the top to trim the video, removing a lot of unwanted footage. This is essentially the same as the trimming function in PowerPoint, but you immediately remove all the footage from the video, rather than having to use the compress media function. You may want to do this if you want to keep the resolution of your video, and it’s larger than the highest 1080p resolution available with compress media, such as 4K.
It may also be useful to use HandBrake to convert the format of a video not playing in PowerPoint. My colleague John has written a nice overview of how to do this and what else you can do if embedded videos in PowerPoint aren’t playing, and there’s a good test file to see what might be causing the problem on your computer.
Leave a commentWithout a proper PowerPoint template, presentations can be a bit of a mess. Here are the building blocks for developing a PowerPoint template that works!
By applying some key principles of presentation design, you can make your PowerPoint design really standout and deliver both a more ‘popping’, but also more effective presentation.
Most presentations are a cascade of text-heavy Death-by-PowerPoint slides. Online learners suffer the torture of brochures converted to click-through-eLearning. Most people now recognize that using visuals is the way to go. But how do you make visual presentations and eLearning that work? We think there are six steps you need to follow.
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Tell me more!This is awesome! You guys are great to work with and we will absolutely recommend you to others.
John Capuano Lone Beacon
Thank you it was very helpfull
Very helpful especially the zip details 🙂
Tip 2b: you can convert the TIFF or PNG files in your presentation to JPEG as follows: selecting it, cut it (Ctrl – x), then use “Paste Special” and choose JPEG to paste it.
Thanks for you tip. It was very helpful.
This was SO helpful!! Thanks!!
Very helpfull!
Thank you!!!
Thanks for the tips and also for sharing the deck!
The .zip trick was extremely helpful! Thank you!
Hi Karl
Thank you for this information, it is always a struggle to deal with file size. Just a note, when viewing your video, all views showing PowerPoint and flies information is blurry and we cannot read or see the writing properly .
Thanks again, always appreciate your tips & tricks
Alain
Very useful thank you!
I’ve been struggling for days on this, but the zip trick FINALLY allowed me to figure out the size sinks in my ppt! Thank you!!
try saving the powerpoint as a pdf
then exporting the pdf back to powerpoint (I use FoxitPhantom pdf for this)
I just cut a 100 mb file down to 1mb by doing that
That ZIP trick is effective but my computer didn’t want to save the PPT as a ZIP file. What I did instead was right-click on every image in my PPT to “save as picture” on my PC. Many of what turned out to be my file size hogs were revealed as PNG files when I tried to save them. I saved them instead as JPG files. Then I returned to that image, right-click and choose “replace image” and I use instead the JPF version. In my case a 6MB file was cut down to 1MB.
Thank you! Super helpful and worked perfectly!
This was incredibly helpful, thanks so much. I was struggling to figure out which images in my presentation were causing the file to get so bloated. This solved my problem quickly!
Option #2 – excellent thanks.
Excellent! Thank you
THANK YOU! your article saved the day for me.
Very useful! was struggling before I read this!
the tricks are very useful
Thank you so much! This reduced my presentation size from 34 MB to 10 MB!
Super super helpful and amazing step by step approach! Thank you so much!
nice
Thanks a lot!!! All this information was incredibly helpfull. I love what you do at BrightCarbon.
Grettings from Medellín Colombia.
many thanks this is so helpful
Thanks a lot for your great article. I enjoyed a lot the idea to spot the large size images by copying and renaming with zip extension. Brilliant! Thanks for your sharing and have a nice day
Question: On the copy of the file, click on the .pptx and change it to .zip.
How on earth?
If I click on the .pptx, it opens Powerpoint. Any idea?
Thanks so much for all your advice in this article! Easy to follow and helped me loads.