Pasting images into PowerPoint balloons the filesize
This one gets filed under the ‘you learn something new every day’, category. Have you ever noticed PowerPoint files ballooning to horrendous sizes making emailing tricky if not an exercise in futility? I was working with a PowerPoint file that should have been no more than 200-300kb but was instead close to five megabytes. A bunch of Googling and sifting through bulletin boards turned up the answer.
If you copy/paste an image into a PowerPoint file, or even click and drag the image into the presentation, the image is automatically converted to a bitmap image. This can increase the file size ten-fold. The only way to preserve the file-type and the original file size of the image, is to use ‘insert picture’ from the menu.
It would appear the same holds true for Microsoft Word. I don’t know if this has been solved for PowerPoint 2007, but I can confirm that OpenOffice has got it right. Paste, drag, insert, whatever… it retains the original filetype and keeps the file size slimmed down.
