Why I Can't Backup My PowerPoint to a Floppy Diskette

Jim Hutcheson
Troy University - Ft. Benning

While I am pleased that so may users attempt to protect their work by making a backup copy, I am sometimes called to help make such copies. The "Disk Full" message doesn't compute to some users when they start with a blank diskette! The obvious problem is the size of the document they are trying to copy to the diskette exceeds the storage capacity of the media selected. This occurs most often in PowerPoint.

The problem with the size of PowerPoint files almost always is the size of the graphic images used or the combined weight of the total number of images. It is rare to find a PowerPoint user who is aware that the weight of an image is not affected by re-sizing down in PowerPoint. When shown the total weight of a PowerPoint presentation, I often hear something like "But I sized my images down!" I also find that the scanned images are saved as Bit-Mapped files because the filetypes of the scanner are listed alphabetically and .BMP is the first type.

After a quick discussion of the need to save as JPG or GIF and to re-size the images used outside of PowerPoint and then insert the re-sized images I am greeted with the two questions "How can I do that?" and "Where do I get an image editing program?"

A relatively easy to use program recently surfaced in my collection of useful software which is just the ticket for such a situation. It's called Iview (PC Only) and it has several nice features for my technical benefit - it doesn't install (drag and drop), it's small, and it is free! Further it allows the user to open a BMP image and save as a JPG or GIF. This really helps in reducing weight of an image.

The save to JPG or GIF process is simply to open the image and save to the desired filetype from a short list of image filetypes. Once an image is opened, the Image menu item offers a resize option with an option to "preserve aspect ratio" checkbox for proportional re-sizing. There are several other image editing features in the program which may be useful (rotate, brighten, etc) and a fairly intuitive slideshow process with a generous set of preview options.

The best use I have made of this product was to reduce a 23MB PowerPoint file to 435KB and we did make a backup copy on a floppy!

Download iview now.