Keeping file size small

[Marty_Crandall]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: Intel

I am building a .ppt file by inserting pages pre-assembled in illustrator. I know that I can turn my .ai files into a multipage pdf which would be easiest for me - and I know that I can insert the mulitpage .pdf into the .ppt document page by page. I am concerned about making my .ppt file too big and I do not have much time to build this .ppt.

Does anyone have suggestions for how to go from .ai files into an emailable .ppt file? Are .pdf files the best way to go? And is there any risk to importing pages out of a large multipage .pdf file? I don't want each page to have a "memory" of the rest of the file - thus making my .ppt file huge.

* *note - please do not point out that the .pdf file should be sufficient - the request was to deliver a .ppt file**

Thanks!
Marty

 

[Jeff Chapman]

Hi there, Marty,

It depends on what you want as the end result.
If you just wanted to show the Illustrator pages
as static images on your PowerPoint slides, you
could export them for Microsoft Office (PNG) from the
File menu in AI, and then paste them onto the slides
in PowerPoint.

However, if it's important that you have a very
high level of detail for printing, it would seem
better to paste into PowerPoint as PDF.

At any rate, Illustrator really only allows for
single-page documents (unless you count page tiling,
or the new multiple artboards in CS4), so it would
be beneficial to go back to the original AI files,
export each page as either PNG or PDF, and then
deal with each page separately. Depending on how
many pages you're talking about, that could be a lot
of files. I would think that the ideal should be
one AI/PDF page per one PowerPoint slide.
Pasting a multi-page PDF file onto one PowerPoint slide
as you mentioned could cause serious file bloating.

You could also just forego PowerPoint entirely, and
output to full-screen PDF from AI. That way, you'll have a
black background, like a PowerPoint slide show, sans
animations.

Jeff

 

[Marty_Crandall]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the reply.

I have most of my document already built in a tiled .ai file - so I was hoping to avoid the tedious copy/paste/save as PDF - since I can create a multipage PDF directly from my tiled .ai file.

But it sounds as though pasting individual pages from a multipage PDF will create a large .ppt - bummer.

It sounds as though you are thinking that if I have my .pdfs as single files for importing instead of importing them from a multipage - that I will not have the big file problem. In the end I would rather paste .pdf files instead of .jps.

One last question - is there a tremendous difference in the final .ppt file if I were to import PDF versus JPG?

I ran a quick test and my 900KB .pdf turned into a 2.6MB .pptx!

I have my fingers crossed that they will accept a .pdf since there is little time left - and none for monkeying around.

Thanks,
Marty

 

[Jeff_Chapman]

Hi again, Marty,

It sounds as though you are thinking that if I have my .pdfs as single files for importing instead of importing them from a multipage - that I will not have the big file problem. In the end I would rather paste .pdf files instead of .jps.

Well, the biggest issue with pasting as PDF into your Powerpoint slide is that you can really only see one page at a time of your PDF anyway. So if the original PDF that you paste had 27 pages, you'd still only be able to see page 1 in Powerpoint, while the other 26 pages remain inaccessible. That's why I suggested that you save your PDFs from AI as separate files, page by page.

If you don't want to bother taking the time to split up the pages, and you have Adobe Acrobat installed, Acrobat can do it for you, turning a 27-page file into 27 different PDF files.

But whether you paste your 27-page PDF into a single slide in Powerpoint, or paste 27 separate PDFs onto the slide, the bottom line is that you're still working with a lot of data - maybe too much to comfortably e-mail somebody, unless they have a fast connection and lots of e-mail disk space, and a high ceiling on e-mail file sizes.

Whether you use JPEG, PNG, GIF or PDF depends greatly on (1) how you want it to look in PowerPoint, and (2) what kind of data you're working with. If the original AI data contains a lot of bitmapped images, photos, effects and so on, you may be better off going with PNG or JPEG. On the other hand, if you're working with basic diagrams and some text, with few to no photos, you could even try outputting your pages from AI as GIFs. GIFs will compress well and give small file sizes, even when pasted into PowerPoint. Probably the results will be better than pasting PDFs.

My personal method for handling your situation quickly and effectively is to create slices in AI for each page, and then output them all in one fell swoop via Save for Web in AI. If your settings are correct, AI will even number the files (slices) for you, based on the slice numbers. Put all of the outputted images into a separate folder, open the folder on your desktop next to your PowerPoint slide in slide sorter mode, and just start dragging and dropping those images to each slide by the numbers. If you need more output resolution for a specific page, all you have to do is select that slice in the Save for Web screen, and adjust the output settings.

Bottom line is: don't mess with pasting as PDF into PowerPoint if you want to email a multipage document, unless you really need to and can live with the file size. That's my idea. Will be interesting to hear how it turns out for you, Marty.

Jeff

 

[Jeff_Chapman]

One more idea, Marty - I know there is no time for you on this particular project, but there is a product called PDF2Office that will do a fairly nice job of creating actual PowerPoint data from a PDF. I've tried it a bit, and it seems to do a good job of making fairly small PowerPoint files. So your workflow would be AI -> PDF -> PPT via PDF2Office. There's a trial version available that you could check it out on.

Jeff

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

* *note - please do not point out that the .pdf file should be sufficient - the request was to

deliver a .ppt file**

Fair enough. But does the end user simply need to display the slides you provide, as-is, no
chance that they'll ever need to change the text or graphics?

Or would the inability to change text/graphics actually be a plus?

Or do they expect to get a "real" PPT that they can modify as the need arises?