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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume XI, Number 1 |
September
2005 |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume XI, Number 1 |
September
2005 |
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By David Holzemer, CIDDE Instructional Technologist If you are using a lot of images in PowerPoint, you may notice that slides containing images take a long time to display, or your
students may find it takes a long time to download the slides from CourseWeb . The problem could be that the size of your PowerPoint files is very large. However, there is a solution: By using one of PowerPoint’s built-in features, you can shrink the size of your files in a matter of moments using the instructions in the following tutorial: Begin by opening the offending PowerPoint file and locating the Picture toolbar. If it is not showing, click on the View menu, navigate to Toolbars , click on Pictures (Illustration 1) and the Picture toolbar should appear (Illustration2). Look for the ( Compress Pictures ) icon. If you are unsure, move your mouse over each icon and watch the tooltips. The one you are looking for will display Compress Pictures (Illustration 3). Once you have located the icon, click on it. By doing so, you will trigger the Compress Pictures dialog box (Illustration 4). Choose the following settings:
With that completed, click OK . You will then be asked if you want to apply picture optimization (Illustration 5). Click Apply . If you choose not to apply picture optimization, you may notice a difference in the image quality. The final step is optional, but one I highly recommend. That is to save the presentation under a new name. There are two reasons for this: The first is that you are making changes to the images that you will not be able to undo and the second is that it is always a good idea to have a copy of the original file to go back to if something goes wrong. If you have a large number of photographs embedded into your presentation and follow the outlined steps, you should see a significant file size reduction. In the tests I conducted I compressed presentations ranging from 10-15MB in size and compressed them to 1.5-3MB with little or no loss in image quality.
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A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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