After giving a talk last night in which I used a lot of images and very little text, one of the participants emailed me with the following question:

“Dear Gavin,
I attended you very helpful presentation at the Basingstoke Country Park Hotel yesterday.  There is a 13th tip that I would find helpful.  When I put photos into my presentations the file size grows massively and it becomes difficult to manage.  I have real difficulties e-mailing presentations with lots of photos in for example.

How do I insert photos in a PowerPoint presentation and yet keep the file size down? I know there must be a way of doing it.

I would appreciate your advice.”

My response was as follows:

“Thanks Steve – What a great question:

 For Powerpoint 2003:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA011168821033.aspx

 For Powerpoint 2007:
http://presentationsoft.about.com/od/powerpoint2007/ss/080508compress.htm

 Or you could buy a purpose built file compression utility such as

http://www.balesio.com/fileminimizer/eng/index.php?gclid=CIGrodblxZsCFVUA4wodiEucDw

 or

http://www.neuxpower.com/products/nxpowerlite-desktop/

 I haven’t tried either of these myself but i think they both have free trial versions.”

 Later in the day he emailed me back and this was his response:

Brilliant!  I’ve just reduced the size of a presentation from 27,843 kb to 519 kb.

Based on his response I thought that some of you might find these links useful too.