Optimizing Publishing Time (How do you do it?)

[hamtra]

I'm working on a project with many slides and many elements of clipart on each slide. Below is a short screenr.com demo showing how I minimized the publishing time of my project from PowerPoint through Articulate.

I'd love to hear of other ways to do this, share your ideas and techniques please. I'm sure we'll all benefit from this discussion.

Screenr - @hamtra: How to minimize the publishing time of courses with many slides, many elements. #Articulate (How do you do it?)

[Jeanette]

Great topic, Tracy! And that's a great idea to save out your slide designs as single image files as you described in your screencast.

Another good way to reduce publishing time is to move recurring items to the slide masters. Generally if I'm using the same layout & design elements on more than just a couple slides, I'll create a master slide for them, instead of inserting the same individual elements multiple times on multiple slides. This really helps with the publish time, because Presenter only needs to publish each master slide once, regardless of how many slides to which it's been applied.

It's also helpful to keep the number of open applications to a minimum, during publishing. Generally if I'm publishing a longer course, I try to close down other stuff down where possible. Though I do usually keep a browser open and during the publish time I come visit the Community Forums.

One more thing that sometimes people don't realize, is that working on a network or shared drive can really slow down publishing, and in some cases can cause issues with the published output. So it's a good idea to always keep source files on the local hard drive, and also publish to a local hard drive, to speed things up and & make sure that the result works.

[beeneeb]

Hi Hamtra,

Here's a copy of my response from an old thread: Improving Publishing Time

First off, make sure that your source files (PowerPoint and PPTA file) are not located on a network or shared drive. Then, make sure that you are publishing to a local hard drive instead of a network or shared drive.

Also, you'll want to make sure that you have plenty of usable RAM. I've got 4GB of RAM installed on my machine, but I may only have 1.5GB of RAM for any new task after the normal OS processes and other open applications. So, in a nutshell, closing background programs can help with this.

Periodically, I like to run my machine through a series of tests to ensure that the machine is up to par. I use a free test called PC Pitstop:

Welcome to PC PitStop!

Other than that, I'd recommend the usual: defragment your drives, clean your registry, and remove various temp files from your machine.

I use a free tool called CCleaner to clean my machine and registry:

CCleaner - Home

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On the PowerPoint side, it wouldn't hurt to verify that you are using master slides whenever possible. If you've got a background image on every slide instead of one instance of it on your master slide, then this will increase your publishing time. Also, you'll want to make sure that you're using the latest Service Pack from Microsoft for Office.

I hope these suggestions help you out. I wish there was just a single item that helps out. Unfortunately, there's usually a combination of factors that impact any software at any given time.