Acrobat to the Rescue

This story is about adding digital images to a Word document to be posted in an LMS - Blackboard then D2L. Originally the Word doc was exported as a PDF (Acrobat) file and posted to Bb. One of the documents was only 34 pages but 77 MB in size - WOW.

Using Acrobat Pro's Advanced > PDf Optimizer menu, the file slimmed down to only 2.1 MB. Now students can easily access the file online or quickly download it.

Powerpoint - On a Diet - Redux

Cheryl Chan (Dental Hygiene) stopped by to compress the two Powerpoint files full of 35 mm slide images she scanned last summer. I had established a high resolution scan setting for her, and a Photoshop batch process to make the images ready for adding to Powerpoint. The batch process is easy to forget. The high res images are 40 MB + each and 40 images in one presentation will cause a laptop to meltdown. No, not really, but a presentation with large images is not very responsive.

Our discovery is that Powerpoint 2004 on a Macintosh computer does not have a Toolbar > Picture > Compress function like the Windows version. So after compressing for web/screen the 400 MB presentation file became a 2 MB file. WOW.

Another way to compress presentations is to convert them to Acrobat (PDF) files. Sometimes just converting saves space, the 400 MB ppt file became a 150 MB pdf file. But Acrobat can compress files using the Advanced > PDF Optimizer function and dropped the file to 2.5 MB.

PDF files are ideal when adding to D2L - Desire2Learn or any other learning management system.