MasterView International
by Luigi Canali De Rossi
March 14th, 2003
Recently I attended a lecture about Mexican culture depicted
through the history of art. Somewhere in the middle of the
lecture, the computer just froze-up. I offered my help to fix
the presentation so that the lecture could be continued after a
short break.
Soon I found out that the problem was the size of the
PowerPoint presentation. The PowerPoint presentations had
almost 40 slides of uncompressed bitmap images. (You can
immediately identify these images by their extension .bmp or,
in some cases, .tif). The uncompressed images caused the size
of the presentation to explode.
You can avoid this problem by using compressed images (e.g.
.jpg) when you create your presentation. However, if it is too
late for that because you are already in the middle of your
live presentation in front of your audience you can apply a
"quick & dirty" solution that can help you to present the
material at least fluently and without hiccups. The solution is
saving the slides that contain images in .jpg format and than
re-inserting them back into the presentation.
a) Open PowerPoint and the presentation that you need to
modify (in my case: "mexico.ppt").
b) Save the presentation under different name (in my case:
"mexico_modified.ppt"). This allows you to modify a copy of
your presentation (i.e. "mexico_modified.ppt") while keeping
the original ("mexico.ppt") safe.
c) Go to "File >> Save As...". From the list box called
"Save as type:" choose "JPEG File Interchange Format (*.jpg)" and
save your presentation in a folder that you can easily find again.
This folder will contain all your slides in a compressed .jpg
format. The slides will be labeled Slide1.jpg, Slide2.jpg etc.
