How To Compress Media Files In MS PowerPoint 2010

A new feature of PowerPoint 2010 lets you compress embedded video in different qualities, suitable for various needs. Video embedding is one of the newly added features in MS PowerPoint 2010. You can either embed a link to a video on your hard drive or the video file itself in your Presentation Slides. In case you have embedded a whole video in your presentation, and want to share it via Email, you can make use of PowerPoint 2010′s media compression features to reduce the size and save bandwidth.

MS PowerPoint 2010 lets you easily compress all the media files in your presentation from it’s BackStage view. So before you save the presentation to your hard disk or share it via Email, click on the Office Icon  to go ‘BackStage’. In the ‘Info’ menu, you will be able to see all the details of the Presentation file. Click on ‘Compress Media’ and choose a quality of your choice to let PowerPoint save bandwidth by reducing the size of all media files in your Presentation. Choose ‘Internet Quality’ if you want to upload the files fast on a slow dial up connection. Choose ‘Presentation Quality’ if you want to save your Slideshow on your hard disk.

The ‘Compress Media’ option is available only when you have embedded the media inside the Presentation and not if you only linked to the video file present in your hard disk. Check out ‘Embedding, Editing and Formatting Video in MS PowerPoint 2010’ for more information.

PowerPoint 2010 removes the trimmed and unwanted portions of video and image files when compressing them. A video file embedded in our presentation was reduced by more than 90% in size with the ‘Internet Quality’ compression (see image below). The video file was trimmed and formatted to lesser dimensions using PowerPoint’s inbuilt video editing capabilities.
You can always revert back the media files to their original quality by going BackStage and clicking on ‘Undo’ in the ‘Compress Media’ drop down menu.