PowerPoint Issues

You may or may not encountered a  problem with the latest revision of PowerPoint, resulting in drastic increases in file size for no apparent reason. While passing files around in email sometimes has the same result.

The current problem seems to stem from importing slides from older presentations — or, worse yet, developing a new show by using an older one as a base. In our experience in creating communication slides, files that were finally pared down to less than a MB  had originally grown to over 5MB. Using the method described below we reduced our recent marketing presentation which inflated to an incredible 46MB before being reduced to 6MB.

If you are experiencing this problem, do the following:

1. Open your presentation in thumbnail mode; select all of the slides and copy (into memory).
2. Create a new, blank show and apply the new template to it.
3. In the thumbnail mode, delete the slides that were part of the template (if any).
4. Paste the slides from the original presentation (currently in memory) into the new show. Make sure that you go to the final slide of the pasted images and click on the pull-down tab and choose “retain formatting.” (Even though all slides should be in the same template, doing this will ensure any embedded photos stay with the new show).
5. Save the file under a new name and compare the sizes of it and the original presentation.

If you have other workarounds or have encountered additional problems using PowerPoint, please leave a comment below