Hi Bill,
I'm interested in this as well. I inherited a rather large PPT presentation,
and I can now say 2 things about such "bloated" ppts:
- PPT 2003 Viewer slows down tremendously on them (say if they are over ~
15 Mbytes)
- any video conversion utility (like PowerVideoMaker) will take a long time
to convert and will have anomalies. If you export as wmv and have a DVDE
authoring program (which must convert to MPEG) then that will also be much
slower.
So I am going through a presentation (about 40 Mb) and resizing images,
which is the main bloat issue, using info provided at the link below and
also TAJ's good article (linked from rdpslides below) at:
http://www.awesomebackgrounds.com/powerpointgraphics.htm
TAJ article talks about the
"Display the "picture toolbar" and "Reset" ..."
to see the original size of the inserted bitmap, but at least for PPT 2003,
this Reset does not actually resize to the original image size at all.
Also, I gather that if you select the image and "Copy" to the clipboard,
that is exactly the bitmap image that was inserted originally?
Also, a handy way to resize a bunch of pictures automatically from ppt is to
quickly create a simple temp presentation with only a single image in each
ppt slide and then save as .. jpg which say for PPT 2003 creates 960 x 720
images which will be very good for almost any typical onscreen application,
and while larger than the DVD resolution (720x480) it should still be
reasonably suitable for DVD conversion.
Cheers,
- Mitch