PowerPoint Tips

Before You Begin

It may be helpful to change a few settings. Leaving them at their defaults can cause you to lose data or even your whole PowerPoint presentation.

1.) Turn Off Fast Saves

Choose Options from the Tools menu. In the Options dialog box, click the Save tab. Remove the checkmark next to Allow Fast Saves.

2.) Cut Back on the Number of Undos

Choose options from the Tools menu. Click the Edit tab of the Options dialog box. Change Maximum Number of Undos to something reasonable. Ten or less seems like plenty; can you remember back more steps than that? Leaving Undos set too high uses more memory and can confuse PowerPoint at times.

3.) Turn off Background Printing

Choose options from the Tools menu. Click the print tab. Uncheck background printing.

Overall, you'll print faster with Background Printing turned off. And your printouts may be better: sometimes PowerPoint misprints notes pages if Background Printing is on.

You may also want to experiment with turning Print Inserted Objects At Printer Resolution ON. This can improve your printouts of e.g. pie charts.

How to Keep File Sizes to a Minimum

PowerPoint files can grow very large very easily. The larger the file, the more cumbersome it becomes as well as more likely to become corrupt and lose data or the file completely. There are several ways to keep your file sizes as small as possible.

1.) Insert a Blank Slide.

Reduce the size of your PowerPoint presentation by simply adding a blank slide to the beginning of your presentation. Your opening slide acts as the preview image that you see when you select your file via the Open dialog box. The more complex that opening slide, the larger it will be, so adding a blank slide to the beginning of your presentation means that the overall size of your slide show will be smaller.

2.) Check Picture Format.

Watch the format and/or size of picture files that you use. A .png file I have seen was: 840 KB, when saved as a *.JPG it became only 60.5 KB. This occurred for example in a 14 slide presentation (contained only 12 pictures) that was 63.3 MB because the formats of the pictures were .png files. When converted to .jpg files, the exact same presentation became 1.13 MB - it could fit on a floppy disk!!

3.) Cut PowerPoint Graphics Down to Size Using Compressed Pictures

(From Daniel Jang, Vancouver, Canada)

(make a backup copy BEFORE doing this)

Add a few images - a photo here, an illustration there-and the size of your PowerPoint presentation can become huge. You could compress images manually, but there's a simpler way: PowerPoint 2002 can do it for you.

On the Picture toolbar, click the Compress Pictures button. (If you don't see the Picture toolbar, point to Toolbars on the View menu, and then click Picture.)
To compress all pictures in the presentation, click All pictures in document.
Under Change resolution, select how you intend to use your presentation by clicking either Web/Screen or Print.
To further reduce file size, select the Delete Cropped Areas of Pictures check box.
Click OK.

While You Work

These following items are not just for while you are using PowerPoint. They are ideas that you can apply to other areas of your work with computers.

Periodically check your \TEMP folder and delete excess files. If there's a lot of stuff in there, it can slow PowerPoint (and other programs) down dramaticly.
NEVER open from or save to a floppy directly. Always copy presentations to your hard drive, open them, save them to your hard drive, then copy them back to floppy if necessary.
Avoid opening from/saving to a shared Novell or NFS network drive. As with floppy, work from a local (ie, on your hard drive) copy of the presentation, then copy it off to the network drive when you're done with it.
Save Regularly and save often. Here's a good way to work: While you're working on a presentation, press Ctrl+S every few slides to save the presentation.

Every time you're about to make any major changes, choose File, Save As and give the file a new name. We like to tack on a number ... MyPresentation-1, MyPresentation-2, MyPresentation-3 and so on.

Every so often, copy the most recently saved file off to another drive, a network drive, removable storage or burn it to CD. That way if the computer's hard drive crashes, or the file becomes corrupt you don't lose all your work.

Problems You May Encounter

PowerPoint is a Microsoft Product, and is not 100% trouble-free. Also, as with any file, you should always have a backup copy just in case trouble arises.

Some of the things that can happen:

The computer crashes and you lose your work or the file gets damaged
You use a floppy disk and it gets mechanically damaged
The file gets so large that it becomes unmanageable and/or becomes corrupted
What shows up on the screen as you work doesn't turn out to be the same on the projected image during the presentation

For these reasons, you should follow these tips to avoid loss of hours of work.

Editor's Note: If you compress pictures or delete the cropped areas, you won't be able to restore your pictures to their original resolution or size.

Resave the File. For some mysterious reason, PowerPoint 97 and 2000 store lots of information in the file that does not get removed when the files are saved and closed. However, if you save the file as a new name, using the SAVE AS command, you will almost always find your files reduce in size, sometimes quite dramatically.
Change Picture Resolutions. To keep your presentations as small as you can, try reducing the resolution of your bitmaps. For viewing on screen, the bitmaps don't need to be more than 96 dpi; they won't print nicely until they're up around 150 or higher, but the screen always displays at 96 dpi, so if the primary viewing medium is the screen, there's no point in having the bitmaps be a higher resolution. Also, the bitmap format can make a big difference to your file sizes. JPEG and PNG both have good internal compression code. GIF has some, but not as good as JPEG. BMP files are the largest; TIFF files will also be very large.

Recovering a Corrupt Presentation

(Excerpted form The PowerPoint FAQ site)

If you're getting messages like "PowerPoint cannot open the type of file represented by .ppt" when attempting to open a PPT file, it's 99% certain that your PPT file is corrupt or that your file was password protected in PowerPoint XP but you're opening it in an earlier version.

If it's an PPT XP file and you're opening it in an earlier version of PowerPoint, have the file's owner open it again in XP and save again without the password protection.

Otherwise, getting a corrupt presentation back may or may not work. If you have an earlier version or a backup of the file, you will likely need to use it. If not, you can try some of the things listed on the next page.

Things to try:

Open a blank presentation (You can apply the template used for the damaged file, if applicable. That might help cut down on reformatting.)
- Insert, Slides from File
- Try to insert slides individually if you're not able to insert the whole thing
If your file corrupted during, say, a computer crash, you can sometimes locate a temporary version of the file in your TEMP directory. If so, you can try the aforementioned Insert, Slides From File and browse to that file. Or you can try renaming the extension to PPT and see if you can open it from within PowerPoint using File, Open. You could also do a search for *.TMP files on the off chance that it's not in your TEMP directory.
There are other things to try in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles:
- Q189549 PPT97: Troubleshooting Damaged Presentations on Windows 95
- Q207377 Troubleshooting Damaged Presentations on Windows (PPT2000) the PowerPoint 2002 Damaged Presentation Troubleshooter at Microsoft's Product Support site.