Trouble e-mailing PowerPoint and Word documents! Why didn’t you say?
I’ve spoken at various government meetings in Africa this month on the subject of development communications, and I’ve also given a couple of training courses with other members of the Scriptoria team. Several people at these events have said to me that something they find very hard is emailing PowerPoint and Word documents containing photos to colleagues - because their email simply can’t cope.
What people don’t seem to realize is that you only have to press a couple of buttons in Word and PowerPoint to optimize images and vastly reduce file sizes - which means you can send them to your colleagues almost anywhere in the world, even when their internet connections are very slow.
So, I’m posting here step-by-step instructions. I’d value your comments.
To open the document, please click here >>>
All the best,
Jim
March 9th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
This is excellent — a great help for those who are not familiar with the Picture toolbar of Word and PowerPoint.
One thing I would add though: I have often come across people using images as a background for several or all the slides of their presentation, where they have placed the image on a page and then copied that page repeatedly — with the result that their file is enormous. The better approach, as I am sure you know, is to place the image on a slide master. It might be worth mentioning this scenario in a future update of your advisory note, or even as a different item — maybe a guide to using slide masters?
The other thought that your post provoked concerns JPEG files. Most people don’t realise that every time you save a JPEG file, say after adjusting the colour balance or changing the orientation, the quality of the file degrades, because the JPEG compression system is a ‘lossy’ one. So it may be better to save all those precious high-resolution images as TIFF with no compression applied. Sure, they will take up a lot more space, but they will not degrade over time.
March 9th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Good comments Paul, I agree with you on all counts. We’ll try and add these notes over the next couple of weeks - perhaps under an ‘Advanced’ section. All the best,
Jim
March 30th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
April 10th, 2009 at 3:10 am
This is quite up-to-date info. I’ll share it on Twitter.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:05 am
Thanks!! Very helpful post!
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:39 am
Thank u for such a valuable information, now i can send ppt to my friends easly