PowerPoint Quick Fix #3 - Photos Can Make or Break a Presentation
That old cliché about a picture being worth a thousand words is a great tip to remember when using PowerPoint. If you can use a photo rather than text to get your message across, then do so. However, pictures are frequently the culprit when problems arise during a presentation.
- The most common cause is that the pictures you inserted into your presentation were huge. Many people insert their photos just as they came off the camera. The problem there is that you created the photos at the highest resolution to get a great shot. That is the choice to make for printing those pictures. If you are using those photos in a presentation software, or on the web, that quality of image is not necessary. You need to first optimize your photos to crop extraneous items out of the picture and to also reduce the overall file size.
• Optimize Photos to Use in Presentations (free tool with Office 2003)
• Crop Pictures in PowerPoint
• Batch Resize and Cropping Tips - From Sue Chastain, About.com's guide to Graphics Software - If you tend to paste your photos from other sources into PowerPoint rather than insert them, surprisingly, this causes a larger file size.
• What Do Photos / Clip Art and File Size Have in Common? - All is not lost if you have made both of the mistakes listed above. You can compress the photos in the presentation using a tool in PowerPoint. The previous two suggestions are preferable, but this will help immensely, especially if time is crucial to get the presentation created.
• Compress Photos in PowerPoint 2007
• Compress Photos in PowerPoint 2003
