PCNet Pick of the Week - NXPowerlite - Shrink the size of
Office files.
Let's face it, bloat in Office files, especially PowerPoint is
ugly. With laptop and server hard drives and Internet
connections over burdened, some companies have simply banned them.
Now there's a workaround in the form of NXPowerlite.
NXPowerlite doesn't "compress" files like a file compression program
such as WinZIP does requiring some sort of processing before they can be
used again; the "shrunk" files are, with the exception of one option,
functionally identical to the original thus making for smaller files to
send via email and also reducing back up time and storage.
The interface is as simple as it gets. You simple navigate to the
file you want to shrink and select the amount of compression.
Click the optimize button and NXPowerLite is off to the races
displaying the results:
What kind of results? In a sample DOC file that contained embedded
documents the size was reduced from 3.05Mb to 136Kb. That's a whopping
95%! There was a hitch in this optimization; NXPowerLite gives you the
option to "flatten" embedded documents by converting them into pictures.
This yields huge space savings but it does preclude the document from
future edited. "Flattening" is entirely optional.
PowerPoint shrinkage was very impressive. In my test I used normal
compression on a 935Kb file. The resulting 138Kb file looked visually
identical to the original. Tons of bandwidth and storage savings with no
loss of quality.
NXPowerLite currently supports all version of Office up to Office
2007. In speaking with the company Office 2007 compatibility development
is underway and all users of NXPowerLite are guaranteed a free update to
an Office 2007 compatible version.
The price is $45. A 2.5Mb fully functional trial, limited to 10 uses,
is available from the
NXPowerLite web site.
I encourage you to try it yourself, think you'll be impressed.
