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PowerShrink 2007

See Also: Conversation with Bronwyn Lane

Reviewed: Geetesh Bajaj

Date Created: July 10th 2007
Last Updated: February 26th 2009

Introduction

We have reviewed PowerShrink in the past -- so in this review, we will look at the new features that PowerShrink 2007 (aka PowerShrink 3) offers along with a brief walkthrough.

PowerShrink 2007 is a PowerPoint compression product from TopByteLabs Computing, a software company based in Germany. You can learn more about their products from their site...

My contact at TopByteLabs Computing for this review was Bronwyn Lane - thank you, Bronwyn.

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New Features

PowerShrink 2007 provides plenty of new features:

• Fully compatible application for Windows Vista.
• Supports Word 2007 and Excel 2007 in addition to PowerPoint.
• PowerShrink can extract all images from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with just one click

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Download and Installation

Download the installer, run the setup routine and follow the instructions. You'll end up with a PowerShrink program group in your Windows Start menu (see Figure 1 below).


Figure 1: PowerShrink Start menu Group

You'll be prompted to enter your license key details or continue in trial mode.

You can download a 10 use trial version of the product from the PowerShrink website.

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Using PowerShrink 2007

Follow these steps to use PowerShrink 2007:

1. Go to your Windows Start menu and choose All Programs | PowerShrink | PowerShrink (see Figure 1 above).
   
   
2. This opens PowerShrink 2007 interface as shown in Figure 2.
   
   
   Figure 2: PowerShrink 2007 Interface
   
   Click on the Open button as shown in Figure 2 above. This opens a dialog box from where you can select the files which needs to be optimize such as PowerPoint 2007 and earlier versions (.ppt) (.pptx), Word 2007 (.docx), and Excel 2007 (.xlsx).
   
   
   Note: Multiple number of files can be selected.
   
   
   
3. The selected file can be seen in the list of File to Optimize with the original file size as shown in Figure 3.
   
   
   Figure 3: Files to Optimize
   
   Here you can select the place to save the optimized file.
   
   
4. Once done click the Shrink button (see Figure 3 above). This will start the process of optimizing the file as shown in Figure 4.
   
   
   Figure 4: Optimizing file
   
   This might take some time depending upon the number of files selected for optimizing.
   
   
5. Finally, the window opens which shows the old size and the new size after optimizing the file, and the reduction percentage.
   
   
   Figure 5: Optimized file
   
   
6. The optimized file is saved with a prefix of PowerShrink, it does not overwrite the original file.

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Pricing and Support

PowerShrink 2007 costs US$39.97 for single user licence, multiple user licences are also available.

Support options include an online FAQ and email support.

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Conclusion

PowerShrink is a very useful application since it brings down file sizes considerably -- now that it also supports Office 2007 file formats, it can only be more useful. Do remember though that it doesn't work with pre-Office 2007 versions of Word and Excel although older versions of PowerPoint are supported.

And I love the option that lets you extract all images from Microsoft Office files with one click.

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