Optimising PowerPoint Presentations for the PLCs

The ability to optimise PowerPoint presentations is essential to sharing with your PLC community, as PowerPoint is not designed for the Internet and the file size of ppt files is usually too large.

There are a number of ways to share a PowerPoint file on the web, such as saving as a pdf file if you have a software program that will allow this, or using one of a number of commercial software packages that will do a conversion of a ppt file to a web friendly size, or doing it the hard way by saving for the web using the PowerPoint application.  This page will set out the hard way.

PowerPoint presentations are first optimised by stripping out any unnecessary images and gifs from the presentation and then saving as a HTML file.

Saving as an HTML file has advantages:

• file size of the presentation shrinks to a more web friendly size
• viewer doesn't need to have PowerPoint on their machine to view the presentation

Optimise

PowerPoint presentations are optimised by removing slide images and background images/colours:

1. Go to Format / Background to open the Background fill box, click the down arrow.

2. Select white from the colours displayed in the drop down table, check the box next to Omit background graphics from master and click Apply to All. This will remove background images from all the pages and replace them with the colour you have selected.

 3.  Go through each PowerPoint slide and remove any unnecessary images, logos and animations from the presentation

Save

1. After optimising the presentation, go to File / Save as Web Page

2. In the File name box, type a name for the Web page.
(Remember to use proper web naming conventions, ie; no spaces, special characters or punctuation).

3. In the Save in: drop down list, select the location for your html file.

4. Click on the Publish button.  Leave the default options as they are, and check the checkbox next to: Open published Web page in browser

5. Deselect the option which says: Display speaker notes.

6. To change the web page title that will appear in the title bar of the web browser, click on the Change... button and type in the new title in the Set Page Title box, and then click OK

7. Click on the Publish button.

8. Test your pages in the browser that opens.

9. Sample PowerPoint file optimised in this way was reduced from 2,385 kb to 148 kb