Saving Power Point Presentations

A. Preparing a Power Point Presentation for the Web.

Making Power Point presentations available on the web is good way to deliver information to the public. There are two major considerations when preparing and saving Power Point presentations for the web:

1. Be sure you presentation clearly delivers your message without the additional information you would provide verbally if you were giving an oral presentation. If you make the actual ppt presentation available for download or to be ordered you may want to have avail abel a "script" with additional information.

2. Reduce the size of your ptt file before saving for the web.

Most Power Point presentations need to be compressed before being saved for presentation on the web. The following are the key steps abstracted from a Microsoft Office Technical Note;

B. Reducing Image Sizes For The Web

PowerPoint 2002 and later can compress images and remove unneeded data:

1. Right-click on a picture, and then click Format Picture on the shortcut menu.

2. In the Format dialog box, click the Picture tab, and then click Compress.

3. Under Apply to, click All pictures in document.

4. Under Change resolution, click Web/Screen.

5. Under Options, select the Compress pictures check box and the Delete cropped areas of pictures check box.

6. Click OK.

7. If prompted, click Apply in the Compress Pictures dialog box.

   Power Point compresses the picture or pictures for you automatically.

Tip: Check pasted or dragged graphics for embedded objects.

When you copy and paste (or drag) an image or a graphic that includes an image from another program into Power Point, Power Point may create an embedded OLE object. The OLE object includes a Windows® Metafile (WMF) picture of the image. Power Point normally compresses images very efficiently, but it can't compress images in WMFs, so copying and pasting or dragging images into your files can make your files quite large.

Embedded objects are easy to shrink. After you no longer need to edit the image (by double-clicking it), do the following: Right-click the image, point to Grouping on the shortcut menu, and then click Ungroup. Next, immediately right-click the image again, point to Grouping on the shortcut menu, and then click Regroup. Ungrouping throws away the OLE data and leaves just the picture— in a form that Power Point can now compress.

Incidentally, it's okay to copy and paste images from one slide to another within Power Point Power Point stores only one copy of the image no matter how many times you use it, so reusing an image can actually help keep your file sizes down.

C. Saving Your Power Point Presentation for the Web.

A Single file Web pages (*.mht, *.mhtml) - A single file Web page saves all the elements of a Web site, including text and graphics, into a single file. This encapsulation lets you publish your whole Web site as a single encapsulated aggregate HTML document (MHTML) file. This format is supported by Internet Explorer 4.0 and later. However, it may not display properly with Netscape and some other browsers.

A Set of Web Pages (*.htm, *.htm.) - When you save your presentation as a web page, Power Point creates a folder that contains an .htm file and all supporting files, such as images, sound files, cascading style sheets, scripts, and more. Save your presentation as a Web page when you want to edit it with FrontPage or another HTML editor, and then post it to an existing Web site. (from Microsoft's About Publishing .ppt Files to the Web)

This will give you a large number of files that may be slow to load for many users and may not display properly in Netscape and some other browsers.

Save as an Acrobat, .pdf, file - This is usually the most efficient and effective way to post your Power Point presentation on the web for most users. You will need to have the Standard or Professional version of Acrobat on your computer and save the .pdf file at the "Smallest File Size" see Saving Acrobat (.pdf) Files for Web and Email Use.

NOTE: It is often a good idea to offer, on your web page describing the presentation, to send anyone a copy of the actual full Power Point presentation on disk or by email it they want to use with their organization or club.