presentaid File Size Inspector: Conversation with Laszlo Diewald

    Laszlo Diewald has been working as a consultant for more than 10 years now. He started his career as an employee right after his study at the Technical University of Munich. Shortly after, he decided to become self-employed as a freelance consultant. In 2017, he founded his own consultancy, with a focus on large scale projects in the financial sector. In parallel, he started working on presentaid, which was finally launched in April 2022.

In this conversation, Laszlo talks about presentaid’s new File Size Inspector.

Geetesh: Laszlo, what led you to build a File Size Inspector, and what problems were your users running into?

Laszlo: It came from a question I kept hearing, usually late in the evening: “Why is this deck so big?” Typically asked the night before a steering committee, when Outlook refuses the attachment or the upload to SharePoint crawls along.

The frustrating part is that PowerPoint gives you essentially one number: the total file size, and no way to find out where it comes from. So, people do what I did more than once in my PMO days: delete slides at random, save, check the size, undo, try the next one. Or they run Compress Pictures over the entire deck and hope it was the pictures.

What our users kept running into, and what we found in our own decks is that the weight is rarely where you would look first:

• A photo straight from a phone or a stock library, 6,000 pixels wide, where 2,000 would look exactly the same on the projector.
• The parts of pictures you cropped away. PowerPoint keeps them in the file.
• Complete Excel workbooks sitting behind small charts.
• And my favorite: slide masters. Copy a single slide from another deck with “Keep Source Formatting” and its entire master comes along, background pictures and all. Do that a few times and you are carrying designs that no slide uses. Nobody notices, because no slide shows them, and the tools we had looked at only measured the slides themselves.

So, the brief was simple: show me where every megabyte sits; in the slides and in the masters behind them. And then, tell me what to do about it, ideally with a button that does it for me.

And yes, when we ran the first version on our own presentaid presentation: 28.6 MB, and the Inspector found up to 17.2 MB to save. The cobbler’s children always have the worst shoes.

Geetesh: Tell us how it works in practice. When someone opens a heavy deck, what does the Inspector show them first, and how does it help them decide what to fix?

Laszlo: You click File Size in the Proofing group of the presentaid Ribbon, or in the Productivity Pane. The Inspector saves a temporary copy of the deck in the background and takes it apart. That is why it needs a few seconds, why it never changes your presentation, and why it even includes changes you haven’t saved yet.

The first view answers two questions: how big, and why. You see the total size, a green badge with how much you could save, and a bar showing what the file is made of: pictures, video and audio, embedded files and chart data, slide content, masters and layouts, fonts. Below that, every slide of the deck in order as a small bar: heavy slides orange, very heavy ones red, one click to jump there. Often, you can spot the problem before you have read a single number.

Then there are three tabs. Slides lists every slide, heaviest first, with the reason next to it in plain language – for example “Picture 5 · 6,309 × 3,549 px at 473 ppi”. Expand a slide and you see everything stored on it, each item with a Select button.

One design decision matters a lot here: a slide’s number is what you would actually free by fixing or deleting it. A logo on every slide is stored only once, so it isn’t charged to any single slide. That way the numbers add up to the real file size, and you can trust them when you decide what to cut.

Masters and layouts do the same for the design behind the slides: how many slides use each master, which masters are unused, and which layouts carry weight nobody needs.

Recommendations are where the decision is made for you. Each recommendation says what is wrong, how much it saves, and what to do. They are sorted by impact, so you start where it matters and can stop as soon as the deck is small enough. Most come with a button – delete the unused masters, select the pictures nobody can see, jump to the hidden slides – and for anything you do yourself in PowerPoint, “How to do it” gives you the steps.

The biggest lever is usually pictures, so we built our own Compress Pictures dialog. It offers the same resolution presets as PowerPoint’s, but it shows you the estimated result before you commit. Then, it saves a compressed copy, opens it, and the Inspector tells you how much smaller it is than the original.

Writing a copy instead of touching the original was deliberate: you keep the full-quality deck for editing and send the light one. In general, nothing in the Inspector changes your deck by surprise – deleting masters or layouts asks first and can be undone with Ctrl + Z.

Geetesh: How would you describe the value of this tool for teams that share decks by email or SharePoint? And is there a trial version available for readers who want to try it?

Laszlo: For a team, a heavy deck is never just one person’s problem. It is copied into every inbox it is sent to, into every reply-all, and into every version on SharePoint.

By email the cost is obvious: the attachment bounces, and the workaround – zip it, upload it, send a link – costs time exactly when you have none. Next week’s version has the same problem. On SharePoint and Teams it is less visible but just as real: heavy decks are slower to open, upload and sync, and with version history, every saved version keeps its own copy.

The bigger lever for teams is templates, because masters spread. If the master deck everyone copies from carries unused designs and full-resolution photos, every presentation built from it inherits them. Clean up the template once with the Inspector, and every deck that comes after it starts lean.

Day to day, it turns a guessing game into a quick routine before you hit Send: open the Inspector, work through the top recommendations, done.

And yes, there is a 30-day free trial with all features, including the File Size Inspector, and no credit card required. The step-by-step guide is in our Knowledge Base.

My suggestion: install it and open the biggest deck on your drive. I would be surprised if it didn’t find something.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.