How to Drastically Reduce Your PowerPoint File Size

Robert Greiner -

I just tried to email a PowerPoint I was working on to a colleague for some feedback and realized, to my horror, that the file size was over 80MB. Obviously, that won’t do.

After digging around, I came to the conclusion that the massive amount of images I was using in the file had to be the issue. Going through and manually resizing each image seemed like too much of a chore though, certainly there had to be a better way. Luckily, there is!

In PowerPoint 2016 for Mac do the following:

  • Click on an image - any image will do
  • Select “Picture Format”
  • Select “Compress Pictures”
  • Select the picture quality from the dropdown
  • Ensure “Delete cropped areas of pictures” is selected
  • Choose to perform this action on the selected image(s) or all of them
  • Click OK

And there you have it. After doing this one simple step, my file size went from over 80MB to around 7MB. Not too shabby.