Optimizing and reducing your Files
Optimizing your course for optimum download speeds is good practice, especially for rural students and to keep download times to a minimum.
Optimization of Files and Images
- How do I import a web site?
- How to optimize images quickly (use image resizer utility from Microsoft for free)
- How do I optimize a PDF document?
- How do I reduce the size of an existing PowerPoint Presentation?
Compress PowerPoint Presentations In Versions Before 2007:
1. Open your PowerPoint presentation
2. Click File Menu and then Save as
3. In the save dialog box, click the Tools drop down menu
4. Select Compress Pictures
5. Select All Pictures in document
6. Select Web/Screen unless you need to be able to print the presentation in high quality.
7. Select Compress pictures and Delete cropped areas of pictures
8. Click OK
9. Confirm that you want to Compress Pictures (if the dialog appears)
10. Save your presentation to a new file name (example: week1.ppt)
11. Click Save
Compress PowerPoint In Office 2007:
1. Open your PPT file
2. Click the SAVE floppy icon in the upper left hand corner
3. Click the Tools drop down menu besides the save button
4. Select Compress Pictures
5. Click Options
6. Check Automatically perform basic compression on save
7. Check Delete cropped areas of pictures
8. Check the appropriate target output (print, screen, or email)
9. Click OK
10. Click OK to the Apply compression settings now dialog
11. Save file to different file name (ex: week2.ppt)
- How to optimize a
Word document
A quick way is to select the image within the slide:
1) select image in presentation
2) edit > cut
3) edit > paste special
4) select paste as JPG, then double click the image, and make sure it is compressed for the web
Image Compression
How to optimize images quickly (use image resizer utility from Microsoft for free)
- Most images start out very large, both in file size and actual viewing size. For
example, a 30K image in a 5K html file could easily take fifteen seconds to download on a 28.8 modem. That is still acceptable.
An image over 100K, however, would cause frustration with your
site—visitors might wonder why you just didn't include a link
to the larger image. In most cases this means your image is too large
or not compressed.
Avoid too-large of files by going into the image editor, cropping out any unnecessary information, and using JPG or GIF compression. Use JPG for photographs and gradations; use GIF format for drawings, graphs, etc. With JPG, you can usually get away with high compression, as in a low setting (between 30 and 50 per cent). When compressing for the gif format, you can usually get away with adaptive 32 or 64 colors, and get great compression.
You should be able to compress a large image to fewer than than 20K and still have a good-looking image—unless you have a very large image such as a map. The best thing to do in this case is to either create a smaller version linked to a larger file or create a link to the larger version, letting the visitor know that this will be a large download. Again, it is easier to put all the images in an images folder beneath the root web folder.
- BMP (Microsoft Windows Bitmap): Bitmap (BMP) is the standard Microsoft Windows raster file format that has no compression rate. Normally, it is not a very efficient format because it is not compressed, which makes it unsuitable for online use and increases the size of source PowerPoint files considerably.
- GIF (Graphics Interchange Format): If the image has fewer than 256 colors, GIF can render the image exactly. When the image contains many colors, the software that creates the GIF approximates the colors with the limited palette of 256 colors available. GIF is a very popular format due to its ability to animate using multiple layers and its support for transparency.
- JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group): JPG or JPEG works best for images with lots of subtle color variations, such as a photograph. It is not so suitable for graphics with areas of continuous color. It does not work so well on non-realistic images, such as cartoons or line drawings. It can contain millions of colors, but it does not support transparency. If you have any kind of image that has smooth, shaded transitions, in most cases JPEG is a better choice than GIF.
- PNG (Portable Network Graphics): PNG uses a lossless compression method (i.e., no degradation of image quality) like GIF. It has two formats, PNG-8, which supports up to 256 colors, and PNG-24, which supports millions of colors. PNG is of principal value if you have an image with large areas of exactly uniform color, but that contains more than 256 colors.