Blog post

Hidden space wasters

December 7, 2011 · by Jan Schultink
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File sizes in PowerPoint can quickly mushroom. We discussed PDF-ing and/or image compressing before to get the size of your files down.

But here are 2 additional inflators of file sizes that these techniques might not catch. The first one is logos. In order to get the sharpest logo images, you need to search for large logo images. So a typical logo page with 20 or so logos can become a huge consumer of space. But the resulting logo images are actually not that big, you can compress them further (to 96 dpi) than the other, larger images in your presentation. Make sure you uncheck the apply-to-all-images-in-this-presentation box when doing this.

Another space waster is your template. If you were guilty of Frankensteining a deck together from multiple presentations, changes are that your slide master contains duplicate copies of slide masters. Especially title pages with big images can add up. Go through your slides and the slide master to clean things up.

ImagesPowerPointPresentation design

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3 comments

Jim2011-12-07 20:25:22
Unfortunately, I feel the captcha (word verification) is a good idea. Blog commenting is a doorway hacking. Even though the blogger can moderate which comments get posted, the “commenter” has still gained access. And even though the blogger deletes the comment, damage may have been done.

Captcha will not prevent a human from commenting, but it can prevent a 'bot' from commenting. There are programs out there crawling the web looking for these doorways to insert coding, primarily links to some other web site. This is done for search engine optimization because many links from popular web sites will boost a less popular web site’s page ranking in search engines. Those surreptitious links won’t appear on a web page to a human visitor because they are hidden inside html tags, but search engines will see them. Worse, depending on just where it inserts the code, it can cause the hacked page to crash.

I said captcha will not prevent a human from gaining this access, but a normal human wouldn’t take the time to do this. But a determined human can write a program that can scour many thousands of sites per hour looking for these vulnerabilities. Once found and catalogued, it can come back for repeat visits.

I know this from experience. I used to not want to burden commenters with captcha. Then my site – not just my blog pages, but my regular site at the same domain – got hit several times.
Jan Schultink2011-12-07 16:38:19
I will try when I have a minute. I do not have to do a word verification. There is a delay in comment posting because I personally approve every single one of them to get rid of spam.
Rohan Rajiv2011-12-07 10:12:05
Can I try pounding on the table requesting for Disqus? :D

While I do feel like commenting for many of your posts, the whole thought of typing on google comments, entering word verification, then copying the comment just in case it disappears tends to deter me.