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

Great PowerPoint tutorial about multiple ways to email your PowerPoint presentations, with background music, voice narration and other multimedia files included.

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: . And for PowerPoint 2007 Presentation in .PPTX and Show in .PPSX, use PowerPoint Viewer 2007: .

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": . 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 () 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.

Dani AI

Generated

Good starter tips from , and useful reminders from about version compatibility — ’s frustration is common. The short modern update: don’t depend on old viewer downloads; Microsoft has retired standalone viewers and today the reliable options are to share a single portable file (PDF or video), package every linked item, or share via cloud links so recipients open the deck in a browser or with current Office apps. (support.microsoft.com)

Quick decision before you send: does the recipient need animations, timings, or clickable links? If not, export a single-file version — a high-quality MP4 for animations/audio or a PDF for static slides — then email that smaller single file instead of the raw deck. Use PowerPoint’s Export > Create a Video (MP4) or Export/Create PDF workflows. (support.microsoft.com)

If interactivity/audio/video must be preserved, include every external asset and reduce size: package the presentation to a folder or USB (Package Presentation for CD/USB) so linked media and fonts travel with the file; or embed media and then use PowerPoint’s Compress Media tool to cut large video/audio; run the Optimize/Compatibility checks to convert older media to modern formats (H.264/AAC) before sending. Test playback on a machine without your dev environment. (support.microsoft.com)

Practical one-paragraph checklist to paste into an email:

  1. Decide PDF/MP4 vs interactive PPTX.
  2. If PPTX, embed fonts or use standard system fonts and package linked files.
  3. Compress media and run Optimize compatibility.
  4. Upload to OneDrive/SharePoint and send a view/download link with permissions rather than huge attachments; still test the link on another account/device first. (support.microsoft.com)

These steps address the compatibility and delivery pain points discussed above while avoiding platform-specific download tricks that age quickly.

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This incompatibility is what I hate about Microsoft!

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