NXPowerLite

Adding graphics, Flash-images, and video spices up a PowerPoint slide show, but it balloons an ordinary presentation to a gargantuan size. Now there’s a simple tool that helps trim those inflated files to a more manageable size.

NXPowerLite, which is available from a UK company called Neuxpower Solutions Ltd., compresses graphic images and embedded objects so that PowerPoint files are more slender. This makes it much easier and more efficient to send presentations by e-mail, let audience members download them from your Web site, or hand out your presentation on a cheap USB memory key.

NXPowerLite is a relatively simple program that is less than 0.4MB in size and does not even need to be installed. You simply place it on your desktop, call it up as needed, and aim it at a particularly plump PowerPoint (PPT) file. The program quickly finds any excessively large images in your slideshow and reduces their size dramatically, in turn shrinking the size of the presentation file. The result is a new slideshow file that may be only a fraction of the size of the original.

This program works best with large photographs that have been reduced to a small size on a PowerPoint slide. It has little effect on small images or on photographs that have already been compressed. Some of our multimegabyte presentations were trimmed to a quarter of their original size. A few were not reduced at all.

Unfortunately, many of the Flash and video files produced by the above programs will be immune to any of NXPowerLite’s compression algorithms. If the program cannot perform any reduction, it immediately informs you.

Skilled PowerPoint users could probably duplicate the effect of this program manually, but why bother? NXPowerLite does it much more quickly.
www.nxpowerlite.com