Y’know how Powerpoint 2007 uses the new Office Open XML file format? (.PPTX)
And y’know how all OOXML files are actually ZIP files?
And y’know how the content in these ZIP files are mostly XML & JPGs files?
And y’know how the benefit of using OOXML is that you get ‘compressed’ files natively?
Well, there’s still this little problem of the JPGs: They aren’t shrunken or reduced. They’re kept in their original resolution and size – and simply reformatted when displayed.
Now this is cool if you plan on reusing the content later. Maybe resizing the photos in the Powerpoint or whatever but if you’ve created a final deck, and you don’t need the images to be 4000×6000 pixel resolution, why not shrink them down to the size of the format in the Powerpoint? They’d require a lot less storage and would be MUCH easier to email.
Introducing Balesio’s PPTminimizer. ($40)
I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when I saw this program being that the tool is pretty pricey at $40 and I hadn’t really done any comparison shopping. But I have to admit – the tool’s demo performed flawlessly against a 9.0MB PPTX file that I had and crushed it down to 3.7MB making it much easier to send to a customer… and near as I can tell, there was virtually no loss in quality. It was simply stunning.
Why’d I insta-buy the product? My feeling is this: I’ll save $40 in my time easily simply by quickly running this product on all the Powerpoints I send to my customers. It only took 10 seconds to compress my 9MB file and not only saves me space on my Skydrive allocated storage on the web, but it more importantly took only a couple seconds to upload instead of a few minutes. Not to mention that now, at 3.7MB, it’s actually conceivable that I could email the deck to someone.
It also has a mode that will autoseek-and-compress Powerpoints on your hard drive or on a server which could probably save some companies massive amounts of storage on their NAS/SAN-based file servers. And that ultimately saves you money.
And I’m willing to bet on most file servers not used by marketing groups or folks that deal with media all the time, that if the tool was executed, most business users would never even know it happened because the quality remains the same.
So give it a try: It comes in two flavors. One is a installable for Windows, and the other is a standalone executable that runs off of a USB drive without installing. Good stuff. Well done Balesio.
kurtsh
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 