Perfectionist's PowerPoint Tip: How to E-mail Your PowerPoint Presentations to Others Perfectly

It's so easy and too easy to make mistakes. You may need to know more about multiple ways to email your PowerPoint presentations, in the right version to play, with background music or movies included, and without any hassles.

You probably think emailing a PowerPoint presentation as easy as "just attach it". But sometimes, your recipients may complain that they can't view your presentations properly. Can't open, no sounds or totally deranged. What happened to this easy job? Let's clean it up today.

Which Version of PowerPoint Are You Talking About

The first issue which should be considered is whether your viewers can open your presentation. PowerPoint Presentation in .PPT and PowerPoint Show in .PPS are the most popular formats for presentations. They can be viewed by PowerPoint Viewer without PowerPoint installed. Just provide the download link of PowerPoint Viewer 2003 for your recipients without PowerPoint: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=428D5727-4.... And for PowerPoint 2007 Presentation in .PPTX and Show in .PPSX, use PowerPoint Viewer 2007: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=048dc840-1....

Besides, as PowerPoint 2007 is not generally compatible with PowerPoint 97-2003, the compatibility issue happens sometimes. PowerPoint 2007 can read PowerPoint 97-2003 files in compatibility mode, but not vice versa. Therefore you'd better add the official solution "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats": http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3.... With this compatibility pack from Microsoft, most PowerPoint 2007 files can be viewed in compatibility mode.

However, the compatibility mode has drawbacks: some elements or effects are changed or missing. The official solution is worth trying unless you choose other preferred formats for your presentations.

Package All as One Presentation and Go

Not all inserted files in PowerPoint is embedded, and most sounds and videos are saved on your local disk. Therefore if you just send the PowerPoint file, you recipients cannot open or play your multimedia contents which are just linked in the presentation. Therefore you need to combine all files into one presentation.

Besides, you'd better not attach files with large size within email. Reducing file size is necessary for further delivery easily. What you can do is to compress all images, audios, etc. in PowerPoint or archive all files with the presentation as one package.

In order to make your presentation email properly and easily, you can package them up. Just make sure that all linked files are placed in the same folder as the presentation even before your insert them within the presentation. Thereafter package the entire folder into one archive file. Do not create self-extracting (SFX) archive since most email block EXE files by default. WinZip (http://www.winzip.com) is still the default compression utility for Windows and WinRAR (http://www.rarlab.com) features the most popular archiver ever. They are both recommended to archive your presentation files for emailing perfectly.

E-mail PowerPoint and Other Solutions

Attach the archived file with your email message and send your presentation now. If the attachment is still too large to send, try to split the archive to several volumes with WinRAR and attach them separately. Alternatively, you might also want to consider uploading the archive file online and just including the download link with the file size in the body of your email message.

Actually there're some other solutions to make all the process proper and easy. As well as PowerPoint version compatibility, converting your presentation to other preferred formats compresses and combines files into one presentation. RealMedia in RMVB and Flash in SWF is recommended if you'd like to do so. You can try Wondershare PPT2Flash (http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash.html) for high-quality PowerPoint to Flash conversion. For RealMedia files, test drive some PowerPoint to video converters for AVI file, then try RealProducer (http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/index.html) to create RMVB file.

It's almost about the delivery details of PowerPoint presentations via email. More than "just attach it", you have the opportunity to express yourself in your email perfectly.