BT Introduces PowerPressed for Compressing PowerPoint Files
Posted by Sachin Garg on 26th February 2006 | Permanent Link
BT Wholesale has announced PowerPressed, a software tool that claims compresses PowerPoint presentations to as little as 5% of their original size. Here are some excerpts from the press release:
Traditional ‘zipping’ applications based on binary compression technology are unable to significantly reduce the size of a PowerPoint file, especially when it contains images. PowerPressed uses a compression technology based on Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), a method developed to exploit the particular properties of image data. This delivers much more effective compression than binary compression can achieve, allowing PowerPressed to reduce the file by up to 95%.
Once the file has been compressed, the .ppt file extension is maintained, allowing the file to be used as a normal PowerPoint presentation. The recipient of the file does not need any proprietary plug-ins or viewers and the presentation does not need to be ‘unzipped’ in any way.
The press release also contains a lot of text explaining how PPT files usually get to big, and how they waste space and how important bandwidth is. But as far as data compression part is concerned, all they are saying can be summarized as “they convert images to jpeg”.