Paul Jordan wrote in the following tip: "At my previous job I was always taking extremely large presentations that engineers put together and reducing them down to a workable size. Engineers love pictures of buildings they are working on. That fine, only they always put them into the slides as .BMP files. Here is where the problem lies. BMP files are very large compared to .JPG files. The first thing I would usually do was to take the picture out of the slide and open it up with a program called ACDSee or something equivalent that converts images. Once converted to a .JPG, I re-insert it back into the slide. One area that's often overlooked is the slide master. A lot of organizations will put their logo on the master and it's repeated however many times they make a new slide. Make sure this logo is changed to a .JPG also. This technique has taken slide presentations that were 30-50 MB in size and reduces them down to 2 or 3 MB...The next time you see a really large presentation (+10 MB), take a look at those nice pictures."

PowerPoint 2002 and 2003 include a new image compression feature that compresses images from within PowerPoint.

1. Select the image.

2. Usually the Picture toolbar displays, but if not, right-click any toolbar and choose Picture.

3. Click Compress Pictures on the Picture toolbar.

4. In the Compress Pictures dialog box, choose whether you want to compress the selected image or all images in the presentation. You can also change the resolution and delete the cropped portion of pictures. (PowerPoint usually stores the cropped portion of pictures in case you decide to restore them.)

5. Click OK.

6. You see a message warning you that compression can reduce the quality of your images. (If you want to play it safe, don't compress all your images at once.)

7. Click Apply.

Photo Editor, which comes free with Microsoft Office (but is often overlooked) offers two handy features for reducing the size of a file. Open the file in Photo Editor and choose File>Properties. There you can reduce the resolution (72 is usually enough for an on-screen presentation) and the number of colors used. To find Photo Editor, choose Start>Programs>Microsoft Office Tools>Photo Editor.