Bloated PowerPoints Are Not “Green”

Uploading oversized PowerPoint slideshows require more time on the computer and requires more storage space (on the student’s computer as well as on the ANGEL server). Bloated PowerPoint slides also take longer to load for a presentation. How do you get bloated files? The easiest method is to simply drag graphic images onto a PowerPoint slide without resizing, trimming or compressing. With the Clean Out Your Office days just past, let’s not forget that every little “green” effort is magnified and can make a difference.

Here’s how you can encourage your students to create more efficient slideshows. The first step is simply to crop unnecessary parts of the images used in PowerPoint in order to further reduce the file size. That can be accomplished within PowerPoint itself (right-click the image, select Size and Position and on the Size tab, use the Crop settings to remove portions of the image from the left, right, top of bottom).

However, the most important step in PowerPoint (2002, XP, 2003 and 2007) is to use the built-in compression (of images) feature. To use it, complete these steps, which once you walk through it once, you’ll find are simpler than the number of steps would indicate):

1. Click on any picture in your presentation.


2. You will see the Picture Tools > Format options appear (upper left corner of PowerPoint 2007) as shown below.
   
   
   Click on the Compress Pictures icon shown above.


3. You will see the Compress Pictures Dialog box. To compress all pictures, leave the Apply to Selected Pictures Only check box unchecked.


4. You can also reduce the file size further by selecting the Options button, which displays the Compression Settings dialog box.
   
   Next your students would select the Print, Screen or E-mail option to reduce quality further (to match intended use).


5. When done with settings on the Compression Settings dialog box, click OK.


6. Next, click OK on the Compress Pictures dialog box.


7. Finally, use File > Save as..." to save your presentation with a new filename (if you want to retain the higher quality version) and add descriptive text such as "For Review" or "Compressed” to the end of the filename. The student should keep the original PowerPoint file, or at least the original images, in case they wish to edit the pictures again.
   I used this process to shrink a 1.09 MB file (had three images on three slides) down to 339 KB (images were compressed using the Screen option). Using the E-mail option would have reduced the file size further.

• There is an additional way or two to reduce the file size of a PowerPoint slideshow.
  
  If you have Microsoft Office installed, you’ll also have access to an application called Picture Manager, a handy tool for cropping, scaling and compressing images singly or in batches. The Picture Manager can be accessed from the Start Menu by selecting All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Picture Manager. If students get their images to the sizes they actually need before inserting them into PowerPoint, the resulting presentation will be much smaller. Picture Manager comes with Office, so there’s no extra expense. Things like Google’s Picasa will do the same thing.


• If students are including videos, they should try to embed the video via YouTube, Vimeo or similar site, rather than insert the video.

Using PowerPoint Slideshows and ANGEL

From the work we do with faculty involved in our ANGEL training sessions, it’s obvious that many of the participants in our transition pilot are using PowerPoint slideshows as part of their course content. So here are a few suggestions.

1. Remember that a PowerPoint slideshow is intended to accompany a “presentation.” That is, it’s meant to be accompanied by a verbal explanation and not to stand on its own.
2. Accepted practice for PowerPoint slides is to apply the 6x6 rule. That is, no more than six words per line (don’t use complete sentences because a presenter should never read a Power Point slide verbatim) and no more than six bullets per slide. That 6x6 rule works for presentations where the text serves as a teaser for the narration added by the speaker.
3. If your PowerPoint slideshow is “wordier” than the 6x6 rule (that is, you have complete sentences of text), and you’re using the slideshow as part of an online class, ask yourself why? Rather than use a bulky medium (PowerPoint) to convey sentences and paragraphs of information, why not just use a web page containing the information? Better yet, use SoftChalk to better format, design and present your content. Additionally, by using SoftChalk you can add text poppers (text that when rolled over displays a pop-up text box with definitions or additional notes), sidebars, inline practice quiz questions, images with hotspots, sidebars of related information, and other interactive learning activities. PowerPoint slideshows cannot integrate any of those features.
4. If you really want to include the PowerPoint slideshow and the necessary audio track to make it useful to your students, then use Camtasia to capture the slides, add the audio and still make the file size small enough to be easily accessed online (Camtasia can output a Flash video file).
5. Finally, if we cannot wrestle away your PowerPoint slideshows, at least minimize their size by using PPTminimizer.