When offering key presentations or policy documents for download, there are a couple of key considerations.

1. Necessity: is PowerPoint and/or PDF the best way to communicate this information effectively?
2. File size: has this file been optimised for painless downloading?

The best choice?
The first question requires discernment by the company, taking into account other alternatives or dual strategies to improve the likelihood of clients using the resource. For example, PowerPoint does provide a clean way to package a presentation for re-use, but also requires MS Office or a compatible program (eg. Open Office) to view. Another option is to use Open Office to convert PowerPoint files to flash format, providing a web-friendly visual display of the presentation as well as a downloadable PowerPoint file.

For text documents, is the layout of the data a concern? For long policy documents, fixed style elements (e.g. letterheads), or documents intended for printing, PDF is often the best choice. For more flexible texts, entry straight into the web page should be considered. Documents should generally not be provided for download in MS Word format without good reason, as layout will change between Office versions, fonts are not automatically embedded and file sizes will be higher. To convert documents from any program to PDF, a PDF printer such as Primo PDF offers a simple, free, solution.

The right size?
PowerPoint is the main offender when it comes to file size, but PDF is not without its concerns.

To minimise presentation file size:

• Resize all images before inserting them into your presentation (see our earlier post on free image editors). When an image is resized in PowerPoint, the original image is scaled down, but remains stored in the document. Add a few 2MB images direct from a digital camera, and the file size will skyrocket.
• Use the master slides to insert background/recurring images and text. The same image copied to 10 slides as a background will take up 10x the space (nb. some presentation programs may handle duplicate images better, including new/upcoming versions of PowerPoint).
• Revise your presentation for the web. Is there anything expendable on the slides? If the slides are intended for clients, rather than presenters, any Q&A-type slides can be safely deleted. Is there any repetition designed for a spoken presentation, that doesn’t read as well on the screen?

To minimise PDF file size:

• When creating a PDF from any PDF Printer or application, there should be an opportunity to choose the quality of the resulting file. While the option names will vary by application, a “screen” level of quality is acceptable for clients/employees to read your document comfortably on a computer monitor, while a “print” level of quality will provide good image quality for printing. “Screen” quality will be substantially smaller than “print” quality,  but the text should remain clear at any setting: the quality setting applies to images, not to text.
• As for presentations, where possible revise your document for online viewing. Multiple title pages, notes pages and other features of your printed documents may not be required for the PDF, and removing any blank pages will avoid confusion for the viewer.