Make PowerPoint file size 4 times smaller

Nikita Kazakov
BasicDrop
Published in
2 min readMar 2, 2017

--

How is this file 40MB? This file is overflowing with image bureaucracy. I can’t email this PowerPoint.

There were lots of images but they looked small in size. No way did they add up to 40MB.

I tried the PowerPoint compress option but it wasn’t good enough (22MB). I found a way to half the size of the already compressed PowerPoint without noticeably destroying image quality.

From 40MB to 9MB in PowerPoint
It does make the PointPoint smaller but we can half this size.

4x Smaller Method

Save your PowerPoint as *.pptx

Download WinRAR and open your PowerPoint file.

It opens! The *.pptx file is actually a zip file.

Opening PowerPoint with WinRAR. Go to ppt -> media. Those are all the images in your PowerPoint.

These image files are not optimized and are the problem.

Copy the media folder to your desktop.

Use TinyPNG.com to optimize images

TinyPNG.com works magic with png and jpeg files and makes them smaller. It will compress them but you likely won’t see the difference visually.

Drag and drop the images into TinyPNG and download the optimized smaller images.

Converting images using TinyPNG

Delete the original images from the media folder you opened in WinRAR and add back the optimized images.

Deleting original images. Adding back the optimized images.

That’s it! Check your file size. It should be smaller than what PowerPoint could do on its own and the images are in better quality.

In my case, it was 4x smaller than the original.

Here’s another example:

From 8 MB to 2.5 MB in PowerPoint

*If the images are privacy sensitive, I wouldn’t use TinyPNG as your files will be uploaded to the server and converted. I’d use something like Photoshop instead.

--

--