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I have a powerpoint file containing images and it has gotten too big for emailing and I need to decide which slides to cut out. But how can I tell which slides are consuming all the space? There could be just a few slides containing over-large images, but how do I know which slides they are? Is there any way to know the filesize of individual slides?

Gary Barrett
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6 Answers6

15

There is a built-in way to measure slides! Publish all slides and use Windows Explorer.

Publishing all slides to an empty folder creates as many presentations as slides you have. Each new presentation stands for one slide and its Windows Explorer file size shows you which slide has the biggest pictures/audio/video.

  1. File, Save & Send, Publish Slides, Publish Slides (button)
    enter image description here

  2. Select All - I recommend using Select All the first time so you can see the size of all your slides. Choose destination Windows folder. Publish
    enter image description here

  3. Review sizes and you can launch each individual-slide powerpoint file to see which one it is and whether you can reduce the size. After you have made ammendments you can individually choose which slides to Publish and see what effect your edits have made.
    enter image description here

    In my sample I had 3 slides with different kinds of media. And the first slide with 12 MB was indeed the biggest one.

Máté Juhász
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nixda
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8

This might depend on the specific version of PowerPoint, but in the version I'm using it is possible to save the presentation as 'Strict Open XML Presentation' file type, which is essentially a zip file with all the elements represented as files within the archive (in some cases this would actually be the default, so no need to 'save as'). So, one can rename the file from .pptx to .zip, open it, and see the sizes of the different element (as well as compression ratio). A good candidate place would be to look under ppt/media. Besides just large images (which can be then easily found and compressed or modified/removed within PowerPoint), in some cases it may contain images from unused master slides, and you may not even know they exist (especially if you are reusing presentations based on someone else's templates). In this case the way to handle it would be to open View -> Slide Master, and browse the master slides to find the one comprising the pictures (and potentially just delete it, if it is not used by any of the slides).

Alex Glikson
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7

The easiest way in the latest Powerpoint 365 or any other version is: Save a copy of your presentation with ending PPTX. Rename the ending to .ZIP Unzip the file, and you will see all individual content. Your pictures will be in the folder under the directory ppt/media. Usually, I found PNG files to be largest, so avoid them. sort your files by size, and convert the largest to jpg. Then remove your original pictures in the PPT file and use the jpg files to replace them.

Andre
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4

To make your slide deck smaller, quickly, try PowerPoint > File > Compress Pictures. This process just reduced a Mac PowerPoint file (version 16.11) that's photography-heavy from 40MB to 14MB with no degradation in presentation quality.

Eric Zimmerman
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2

I wrote a small UNIX script that will unzip a pptx file and then shows you the list of larger images (over 100K) sorted by size. It will also have an "open" command (on the Mac) and it will tell you what slides each of the large images are in.

https://gist.github.com/dmccreary/7734b7148f523771adb38597bcbe5732

Feedback welcome.

Dan McCreary
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I'm using Powerpoint 365 and I really, really miss the publish slides feature. The zip instructions in this thread didn't work for me but gave me and idea that worked which was using the 'Package Presentation for CD' feature. Open your PPT, go to Export, Package Presentation for CD, Package for CD, change name if you need to, PPT name should be selected in box, hit Copy to Folder, choose where to save files and remember location, hit OK, hit Yes for linked items. Go to your new set of folders, unzip/extract the zip file, and there should be one with all of your images which you can view by details and sort by file size. My path: PresentationCD\PPT_Name\ppt\media

Kelly
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