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Introduction
About FILEminimizer Office
Download and Installation
Using FILEminimizer Office
Pricing and Support
Conclusion

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Introduction

In the last few years, there have been a spate of products that offer compression and optimization for PowerPoint presentation file formats. Many of these do an awesome job, making PowerPoint files more lean and compact, and easier to share. Now the next generation of these products does the same compression and optimization for many more file formats including the ones introduced in Microsoft Office 2007. Our review product, FILEminimizer Office is one of them.

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About FILEminimizer Office

FILEminimizer Office is from balesio, a Swiss company that also creates several other products such as TurboDemo and ALLCapture. You can download a free trial version of FILEminimizer from their site...

FILEminimizer Office works just like PPTminimizer, a program that has been reviewed in the past. This new version now compresses all new Microsoft Office 2007 formats: .PPTX, .PPSX, .DOCX, .DOTX, .XLSX and older versions file formats also. The optimization reduces all Office files to a smaller file size compared to their original sizes, without changing the file format or altering the quality. These optimized files are also safer, and ideal for sharing and sending via email. Recipients don't need need any extra software to edit or view the optimized files.

New features in this release include:

• Compresses all new Office 2007 formats (PowerPoint 2007, Word 2007, Excel 2007).
• Compresses all Office formats (PowerPoint 97 to 2003, Word 97 to 2003, Excel 97 to 2003).
• Compresses pictures and embedded objects and shrinks the size of Office files.
• Keeps the original file format - edit, view and change it without the need to unzip.
• Compresses StarOffice and OpenOffice files provided they are saved in a Microsoft file format.
• Compact edition runs directly from CD or USB flash drive - no installation is required.
• Integrated search function finds all optimizable files on the PC.
• "Drag & Drop" files directly into FILEminimizer to optimize several files at once (batch processing).
• Add-ins for Microsoft Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel and Windows Explorer.
• Fully compatible with Windows Vista.

My contact at Balesio for this review was Christoph Schmid, thank you Christoph.

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Download and Installation

Download the installer from the link given above, run the setup routine and follow the instructions. You'll end up with an FILEminimizer program group in your Windows Start menu, as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: The FILEminimizer Start Menu Group

When you run FILEminimizer for the first time, it will ask for your registration details (the serial number) -- alternatively, you can run the product in evaluation mode that allows you to do 12 free optimizations with registration and 5 free optimizations without registration.

You can also find FILEminimizer within the Add-Ins tab of the Ribbon in Office 2007 programs like PowerPoint 2007 (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: FILEminimizer in the Add-Ins tab of the Ribbon in PowerPoint 2007

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Using FILEminimizer Office

FILEminimizer Office works in two ways:

• As an add-in from within PowerPoint 2007
• As a standalone product

When installed, follow these steps to compress a PowerPoint 2007 file using FILEminimizer Office add-in version.

1. Open the .PPTX file in PowerPoint 2007 which you want to compress.
   
   
2. Within the Add-Ins tab of the Ribbon, click the FILEminimizer Office button (refer to Figure 2 above).
   
   
3. This opens the FILEminimizer Office interface, as shown in Figure 3.
   
   
   Figure 3: FILEminimizer Office interface
   
   The interface is explained below:
   
   
   1. Toolbar -- Here you will find options to open files, optimize files, search files, settings, etc.
      
      
   2. The tabs at the left side of the interface replicate the options available on the toolbar.
      
      The Configuration option opens the Settings dialog box (see Figure 4), where global settings can be altered.
      
      
      Figure 4: Settings
      
      
   3. Files to Optimize shows the list of opened file(s), which need to be optimized.
      
      
   4. Optimized Files -- The optimized files can be seen here. To save the optimized files in a particular folder, choose the Save optimized files in folder option.
      
      
   5. Custom Compression -- Activate the check box and click the Settings button, which opens Custom Compression Settings dialog box as shown in Figure 5 -- by tweaking parameters like setting the screen resolution and JPEG quality, you can get the best compression value.
      
      
      Figure 5: Custom Compression Settings
      
      
   6. Compression Settings has three basic compression values which are strong compression, standard compression and low compression.

4. When all the settings are tweaked, click on the large Optimize Files button (see Figure 6).
   
   
   Figure 6: Optimize files
   
   
5. Depending upon the settings, the application will compress the files(s) and shows the changes in next window as shown in Figure 7.
   
   
   Figure 7: Optimized files(s)
   
   In this window, you can see old size, new size, and reduction percentage of the file(s). The three options are for view file(s), E-mail file(s) and delete file(s).

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Pricing and Support

FILEminimizer Office costs US $44.95 for a single-user license.

Support is through email and phone, and a small online FAQ.

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Conclusion

FILEminimizer is a capable program that can help you reduce the file size of your Microsoft Office documents, and the batch processing option allows you to optimize many files at one go.

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