Reduce Office File Sizes
Small is definitely beautiful when it comes to file sizes and, although Office 2007’s new file format produces much smaller files than previous versions, lots of people do not yet use it.
The Problems
Word, Excel and PowerPoint in particular can quickly grow large files, especially when they contain graphics. The problems are:
- Excessive storage space needed on hard disks, especially when multiple copies and drafts are stored
- Greater risk of file corruption
- Longer disk backup times
- Slow opening of files (especially if being scanned by anti-virus software)
- Slow file transfer and lots of bandwidth used unnecessarily
As very large files are not accepted by many email providers, file size is a real issue for many people and, in large organizations, the storage and bandwidth difficulties quickly become major problems.
What you can do to reduce file sizes
I’m going to focus on PowerPoint because, now that many people are (rightly) moving from text-based presentations to ones using more pictures and other graphic elements, the problem of file size is particularly acute for them.
If you are using a version of PowerPoint older than 2003 with the Office Service Pack 3 (the last pack before Office 2007), than the first thing you need to do is to make sure that ‘Allow Fast Saves’ is unchecked in the Tools Menu Options…Save setting. With it checked, when you save a file, Office keeps a history of the changes you have made, rather than creating a ‘fresh’ file. These history-rich files become large very quickly and can cause file corruption. Because of these problems, Microsoft dropped the ‘Allow Fast Saves’ option with SP3 and Office 2007.
The next thing to do is to import resolution-optimised photos into your presentation slides. PowerPoint only displays quite low resolution images, similar to web browsers. There is no point, therefore, in importing a high-res image that will be much bigger than PowerPoint needs. It will just increase the file size.
The one bit of good news is that if you use the same picture several times in a presentation, PowerPoint only counts it as one image.
What is the optimal resolution? Let’s not get into the debate about how resolution should be expressed, but let’s stick with the resolution that PowerPoint outputs in the way Microsoft expresses it: 97 dots per inch (dpi). Whichever way you calculate it, this is quite low, and higher resolution pictures in your slides do not display any more sharply than that. They simply take up file space.
Now, almost no one is going to take the time in a photo-editing program to resize and reduce resolution of photos before putting them into PowerPoint, it would take too long! However, it is possible to get PowerPoint to reduce the size. When you have placed, sized and cropped all the pictures in your presentation, open the ‘Picture’ toolbar and click on the ‘Compress Pictures’ icon. Choose the ‘All Pictures in Document’ and ‘Web/Screen’ options.
The two measures above will help, but this will still leave the underlying files themselves unoptimized.
The best solution
By far the best solution is to optimize your Office files using software dedicated to that purpose. There are several ‘out there’ but the one I have experience of, and can wholeheartedly recommend, is called NXPowerLite. I first met the guys who developed this program at the PowerPoint Live conference in San Diego in 2004. I was impressed with it then, and have continued to be impressed by the improvements they have made since.*
As it says ‘on the tin’, NXPowerLite works quickly, efficiently and unobtrusively to reduce the file sizes by intelligently compressing the graphics and embedded documents stored within them.
Using it you really can’t tell the difference between the original and the optimized file and I have seen some incredible file size reductions: 75Mb to 15Mb, and 3Mb to 450Kb, for example!
You can optimize files from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint, or by right-clicking them in Windows Explorer. NXPowerLite also integrates with Microsoft Outlook and you can set it to ask if you want to optimize your email attachments before sending them.
There are also batch processing options which mean that you can optimize a number of files in one go, immediately freeing up large amounts of hard drive or network server storage.
Best of all, a single user license is roughly the cost of Opazity, so it is extremely affordable and it can soon pay for itself in saved storage space costs.
I could go on about this for a long time, but the best thing is for you to take up the NXPowerLite free trial offer for yourself.
Below I’m giving you a choice of links to the NXPowerLite website. Following the first of these will help support me via a small commission should you decide to buy the program. (You pay no more for the program, the commission is from the company.) The second is a plain link via which I receive nothing. I include this because otherwise you would rightly suspect that I only made the recommendation because of the commission, which is not the case. It is software that I use regularly and recommend everywhere I go.
Link 1: Go to NXPowerLite website for a free trial.
Link 2: Go to NXPowerLite website for a free trial.
* A week after first publishing this, a reader took up the suggestion to try NXPowerLite. She had problems with her card company in making the payment go through and got in touch with NeuxPower, the company that produces NXPowerLite. I’m pleased to report that they went well beyond the call of duty to help her until the payment was successfully made.
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