MS informs that the XML file formats of Office 12 will include a binary (lossless) compression as a default. Binary compression or lossless is in effect ‘zip’. Any of us who have used ‘zip’ will appreciate that zip compression does not in fact reduce digital images files.

MS Office 12 FAQ’s explictly state that the Office 12 XML compression will NOT compress digital images. This appears to bring us back to square one in relation to digital images that are embedded into MS PowerPoint presentations.

Thank you for sharing your views with me. Rob

Compressed XML based files formats in Microsoft Office 12

Save your money for better use Robert :-)

It certainly appears to handle more than image reduction. I suspect that it has been designed to optimise much of the redundancy that Microsoft so often includes in its file formats especially PowerPoints.

I would consider this to be more of a general optimisation tool other than simply an image compression product which is possibly why British Telecom has agreed to distribute it as part of its own ‘Digital Compression Suite’….not sure what the other products are that comprise the suite.

ps, I have fixed the link to your blog, you missed the ‘.’ between zmarties and blogspot :-)

If you read through the help files on their website at

http://fortressgate.net/support/WebHelp/PowerPressed_Help.htm

you will see that all the images are provided as BMP format.

It’s not a stunning recommedation for an image compression product when the website uses a non-compressed format that is so rarely seen on the web (for good reason).

And the way press release tried to use ‘heavy’ words to describe the simple image conversion, is also strange :-)

Maybe they are doing more, but I had read their FAQ and other documentation, and it seems that they are most probably not doing anything else. They have described the case of PPT already containing jpeg files, and say that they re-encode such files to lower quality.

There are many other competing products, so I guess what we need now is an honest benchmark comparing all of them on ‘real world’ files (not on carefully articulated files).

However, it would require more than this to reduce the file size by over 80% in size so I suspect that this product involves a number of other processes other than straight forward image reduction converting to jpeg….especially if the images have already been compressed as jpegs during the presentation creation phase.