Part 28: Why is powerpoint picture-from-file so braindead?

You may remember in Part 27 when we were adding and subtracting pictures in Powerpoint to resize a document.

Here is the question. A Powerpoint slide is a set size, probably 1024x768. When you want to insert a picture in to a Powerpoint slide, can you think of any conceivable reason why you'd want the image to be any larger than the slide itself? I can't, other than to, say, show a blown up part of a significant piece of a large photo, but in that case I'd probably crop it first. In any case, one would surmise that when inserting a "picture from file" it would downsize it to the size of the Powerpoint slide for easy manipulation.

Ha. Of course not. If you put in a 2000x3000px picture, it opens way over your slide, and screen! You have to scroll to the corner and downsize, and then scroll, and downsize again, and then size it to where you want it, and then move it to where you want it in the slide. Kudos, Microsoft, on making something which should take two or three steps (insert, move, resize if necessary) take eight (insert, scroll, resize, scroll, resize, scroll, resize, move). That's productivity.

Part 27: Oversized powerpoints

A coworker says to me: "I am trying to send a Powerpoint document and it's too big. Any ideas on how to resize it?"

We take a look at it. It is just over 5 mb. So we remove one picture and put in a downsampled one. And it is just over 5 mb. So we check the size of the other picture. It's 2.75 mb. Somewhere, Powerpoint has found an extra 2.25 mb.

So we remove the other picture. And resave. Voila! It is now 108 kb. So we put in the offending picture, and somehow it is now 3 mb and won't bounce.

The question, of course, is where that phantom 2.25 mb came from?