If you spend any amount of time taking a look at all the fancy PowerPoint tutorials that are out there using the morph transition and video and images, then you'll be well aware that whilst this is all fabulous and we can create some stunning presentations with some of the newer tools in PowerPoint, it means our file ends up being extremely large.

Imagine if you have a PowerPoint presentation that's got 50 slides and it's very Picture-heavy and contains a lot of video files, then the overall size of your PowerPoint presentation is going to be huge. And what happens when you have a rather chunky PowerPoint presentation? Well, you could start to experience problems when you're presenting.

You could get lag. PowerPoint could hang or even crash. And if we're showing this in something like a Teams meeting, that could be pretty embarrassing. So just a quick little tip today about how you can reduce the size of the videos and the images that you have in your PowerPoint presentation. So let's dive in.

Now in this example, I'm just using a Microsoft template. Now, this is a pretty nice template. It's not too image-heavy. It doesn't actually have any videos in it, but that's okay for this demonstration.

You'll get the idea. But we do have a few images here and there. Now, one thing I do want to highlight because this is something that I teach fairly often and that is using crop and fill in order to fill shapes with images. So I just want to show you an example of that first of all, because this is really going to illustrate the point when we get around to compressing all of the images.

So I'm going to click somewhere down here. Let's insert, I'm just going to insert a new blank slide. And it's put it at the top because that's where I was clicked. Let's drag it down here. And I'm going to put it just there. Now, This isn't going to make much sense, but let's just put a rectangle in here.

I'm just going to draw that just here. So maybe this is something I've decided to draw and I want to fill this with a specific image. Now the way that I always advise people to do this is to right click, go into Format Shape, Expand, Fill, And then choose Picture or Texture Fill. Now, by default, it's going to fill it with the first texture in the list.

That's okay. We can click on Insert underneath Picture Source. And then we can choose where our file is located. So, maybe you've got it saved off to your PC. Maybe you want to use one of the inbuilt stock images, or an online picture, or even an icon. Now I have a picture saved off that I'm going to use, so let's click on From File.

And this is the file that I'm going to use, PictureFrames. jpg. So let's click on Insert, and it's inserted it in, but it hasn't inserted it in exactly as I want it to be. Now, whilst you might not be able to see this, it is Slightly been squished. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the Picture Format tab.

We're going to go to crop. We're going to go to fill and that will make it the correct size. I can then reposition this a little bit if I need to, and then click the top of the crop button to make sure that I have that image in there. And it's not distorted in any way. Now I'm just going to do that. And the only reason I've done this is because that process there of cropping and filling an image, one thing you need to remember in PowerPoint is even if you crop an image and effectively remove parts of that image, normally around the outside, the whole image is still effectively embedded into PowerPoint.

And if you have lots of images that you've cropped in your presentation, whilst you might be thinking that the act of cropping them is getting rid of the rest of the picture, it's actually not. So you could have a whole bunch of really small images that were originally larger images that you've cropped down.

But it's actually the larger image still contributing towards your file size. So just remember that because that comes into play when I show you how you can effectively compress all of the images in your PowerPoint presentation. What you need to do, and I would always recommend that you do this prior to sending this out or maybe uploading it to the cloud, is one of those last steps that I do along with Spell checking and checking for accessibility is click on any image in your presentation.

It doesn't matter which one it is, go to the picture format ribbon. And then in the adjust group, we have a compress pictures option. So if we click on this is then going to pop open this compressed pictures, dialogue box, where we can make some modifications to really make this file size as small as possible without losing too much of the quality.

Now, notice here, compression options, apply only to this picture. Now, if you only wanted to compress one image in your presentation, and that's the one that you had selected, then you could leave this ticked. If you wanted to compress everything in your presentation, deselect this box and it will compress all images.

The second option here, delete cropped areas of picture. So that is what I was just talking about. If we select this option, it's actually going to remove anything that we've cropped out so that it doesn't contribute towards that overall file size. And then underneath we could adjust the resolution if we wanted to depending on what the purpose of this presentation is.

So if you're presenting, you're probably going to want to keep it in HD, but you have different resolution options if you're just printing this, or if you're uploading it to the web, or if you're emailing it, so on and so forth. Now I'm going to keep this in HD, click on OK, and it's basically going to compress all of those images, delete out all of the cropped areas, making my overall file size a lot smaller.