Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Balesio, the makers of one of my favorite utilities, “PPTminimizer”, released a new version of their product.

AN ODE TO “PPT MINIMIZER 4.0”
One of my favorite tools in my arsenal of utilities is Balesio PPTminimizer.  It allows you to compress Office Powerpoint files (2007 and prior) by reducing the size and fidelity of graphics objects embedded within the document.

The premise behind this is that graphics objects are generally much larger than they need to be once they are embedded within the Powerpoint and sized to fit the slide.  A graphics object that’s 1024×768 and is 1.1MB in size might be resized to 160×120 in a slide but it remains 1.1MB within the file.

PPTminimizer resizes the 1.1MB graphics object so that it might take only 100k but still look the same on the slide.

PPTminimizer was always very flexible.  It allowed people to:

• Compress graphics at different compression levels (for example, high compression is great for sending people “drafts” of Powerpoints over email, whereas “standard” is better for archival once the document is completed.
• Automatically compress PPTs (or at least ask you if you want to) every time you send an email in Outlook with a PPT attached to it.
• Right-mouse click any Powerpoint file and compress it.  (It makes a 2nd copy of the file and appends the word, “Optimized” to the file name)

At the end of the day, you were always able to send Powerpoints over email without filling someone’s mailbox.  Compression ratios are usually around 50%-95%… i.e. a 10MB Powerpoint drops down to as little as <1MB in size.

ENTER FILE MINIMIZER OFFICE 5.0
Well, they finally went and extended that PPT functionality to .DOC and .XLS files.  Files that are part of the rest of the Office family of products can now have embedded objects shrunk just like PPTs.

In addition to shrinking graphics files down to sizes that are more appropriate for the fidelity that is necessary within the document, FILEminimizer also “flattens” OLE objects.  If you have an Excel table embedded within a Word .DOC, FILEminimizer can convert the Excel table into a graphics object, greatly reducing the size of the object.

And like PPTminimizer, it will intercept every message you mail with Outlook that contains an Office attachment in it… but now it will compress every .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT (or .DOCX, .XLSX, or PPTX) you have attached to the mail and batch process these documents all at once.

At $45, this is a very worthwhile investment if you send and receive Office documents over the mail or store many documents on server shares.