Email arrived. Embedded Powerpoint slides. 9Mb. Wow.

Saved the slides out to a temporary directory, loaded them in Powerpoint, saved again as PPTX, edited the message (thank goodness Outlook allows this) to remove the embedded slides and attach the PPTX versions instead. Result: 663 Kb — a 93% saving in space, with no loss of fidelity.

Either we need to send everybody on compulsory email attachments training, or email systems need to get much more efficient at this stuff, and clean up the stupid stuff for them automatically.

By the way, Outlook 2010 made it very difficult, if not impossible to save the slides. Outlook 2007 looking at the same message managed it easily. Hmmm.

• Outlook: 485 Kb of HTML = 17 Kb plain text
• How to compress attachments in Outlook

George Skarbek’s column in The Age this week answers this question:

Q: How can I set up a music file to play through an entire PowerPoint presentation? I can get it into one slide, but it stops when the slide changes. P. Turnham

My suggested answer: You shouldn’t. Are you trying to fecking torture your audience or what? Just because you found some tinny bit of computer music that would have the original composer turning in their grave doesn’t mean anybody else wants to hear it, let alone for the duration of a complete presentation. It’s crap, dude, pure crap.

Show your slides, know your facts, talk to your audience, take questions at the end, and don’t over-do the cutesy clipart or animations. That’s how to do it.