Presentation Powerhouse? How to succesfully email a powerpoint presentation with video
So you’ve created a Powerpoint presentation that is going to knock the socks off your audience. It is all singing and all dancing…. literally. You’ve got a good number of graphics, audio and video- you are a Powerpoint genius- you put the ‘multi’ in multimedia presentation. However, when it comes time to email it to your presenting team you are less dancing and more hopping around in frustration as you are unable to send it. Why? Because your Powerpoint presentation has turned into a giant beast that most email servers can’t handle due to its size. As far as your mail server is concerned, your Powerpoint presentation ate too many audio and video files and won’t fit through their doors so they turn it away for fear of breaking their doorframe.
A standard fairly dull Powerpoint presentation with 9 uncompressed photos is around 15Mb, and when the photos are compressed to a suitable Powerpoint resolution the presentation is around 3Mb in size. This is for a fairly plain presentation. However your presentation has lots of graphics, audio and video files which makes for a much, much larger file.
When you consider that mail servers typically have a large email attachment limit of between 10 and 20Mb you can see that a high quality content presentation will have difficulty making it through your mail servers. Hotmail has a large email attachment limit of 10Mb, Yahoo! Mail 20Mb, and MSExchange 2007 10Mb. Moreover, even if the presentation can get through your mail servers you cannot guarantee that your recipient’s mail server will be able to handle your big email attachment either.
While you can reduce the size of a powerpoint presentation by ensuring that the photographs are suitably compressed as their presentation size is usually fairly small, you cannot so easily compress audio and video without significantly reducing quality. Furthermore, after creating your Powerpoint masterpiece, you may well not have the time and energy required to start playing around with file sizes.
Even if you do go to the effort of doing this, you may well still find that your Powerpoint presentation does not get to your recipient due to mail server problems. Users of Outlook 2007 and 2010 have experienced the most extreme problems sending large email attachments. Outlook itself could not deal with the fact that users’ email servers were not allowing emails to go through and repeatedly tried resending the email, locking up Outlook so that users could not even receive their email. You only need to look at the comments on this Outlook blog post and the fact that Outlook themselves couldn’t come up with a fix-all solution to see the scale of the problem. This is clearly a problem that everyone can do without.
Thankfully there are online services for sending large email attachments that will easily handle a high quality multimedia Powerpoint presentation without you having to spend the time compressing files and then hoping that it will get through.
The basic idea of these services is that you send an email using their web-based services, uploading your large email attachments. The large attachment, which can be of any file type, is then put on a server and your recipient is sent an email from the service with a link to the attachment, including your original message. The recipient(s) then click on the link to download the file(s). This gets round the limitations of your and your recipients mail server problems.
There are many large file sending services available with the most well known being YouSendIt, MailBigFile, CuteSendIt and Tonsho. They all offer free and paid accounts with the paid accounts allowing you to send more files, giving you larger storage space and enabling you to brand up the download page if you are a business customer. The major differences between each of these services is the size of file you can send through them. While the typical size of file you can send through one of their free accounts is fairly standard at around 100Mb, Tonsho stands out as enabling you to send files up to 5Gb with their paid accounts whereas all of the others offer only a 2Gb capability. When you bear in mind that you can send all sort of files, including video files through these services, ensuring that you have the maximum capacity would be prudent.
Technology and software capabilities change at an astonishingly fast rate and the files, be they videos, high-res graphics and photos or highly stylised documents that come out the other end exponentially increase in size too. Powerpoint presentations are just as likely to exponentially increase in size as any other size of file. Having a large file sending service that will be able to cope with the size of files you want to send now and in the future is key if your business or your career is to keep up with the pace of change.
Important footnote: Whether you do decide to use a large file sending service or not, you will only successfully be able to email a Powerpoint presentation with video or audio if you remember to attach the original video or music files you included in addition to the actual Powerpoint presentation. This is a key step that many people overlook. If you don’t attach those files, they won’t play in your presentation.
About the Author
Bio: Sam Ross is a specialist in everything email- from how to compose emails that get read and acted on, to solving common email problems like bounced email, right through to email services such as those for sending a big email attachment and managed file transfers.
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