Four decisions determine whether a file is usable by anyone other than you on the day you made it.
How should you name a PowerPoint file?
Naming. A file name is a sort key, and the default habit produces a sort order that is wrong. Take eight versions of a board pack named the way they usually get named: boardpack.pptx, then boardpack_v2.pptx, then boardpack_final.pptx, boardpack_final_v2.pptx, boardpack_FINAL.pptx, boardpack_final_CFOedit.pptx, boardpack_use_this_one.pptx, and boardpack_final_FINAL_2.pptx. Those eight names produce 28 orderable pairs. Sorted alphabetically the way a file browser sorts them, 10 of those 28 pairs are in the wrong order, which is 35.71% wrong and 64.29% right. Rename the same eight as cedarridge-boardpack_2026-02-03_v01.pptx through cedarridge-boardpack_2026-02-20_v08.pptx and the wrong-order count is 0. The convention that produces that result is short: subject, then an ISO date as YYYY-MM-DD, then a zero-padded version number, all lowercase, no spaces. The date sorts correctly because ISO order is alphabetical order, and the zero padding is what keeps v10 from sorting before v02.
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What makes a deck heavy, and how much can you cut?
Weight. A deck's size is almost never in its slides. Decompose the 48.70 MB file from the opening: photographs 38.70 MB, screenshots 5.52 MB, an embedded video 2.80 MB, the slide XML with the theme and the media map 1.14 MB, and logos 0.54 MB. As shares, photographs are 79.47%, screenshots 11.33%, video 5.75%, XML and theme 2.34%, logos 1.11%. The top two categories carry 90.80% of the file and the bottom three carry 9.20%. Any repair that doesn't start with the photographs is decoration.
The number that decides how much you can remove is effective resolution: pixels divided by the inches the picture occupies on the canvas. A 4032-pixel-wide photograph placed full-bleed across a 13.333-inch widescreen slide is 302.4 pixels per inch. A 1080p projector renders that full-bleed slide at 1920 pixels, so it needs 144 pixels per inch, and every pixel above that is invisible in the room. Resampling to 150 ppi requires 2000 pixels across, a linear ratio of 0.4960 and an area ratio of 0.2460, which removes 75.40% of the pixels. The photographs fall from 38.70 MB to 9.52 MB. That's most of their weight gone, and nobody in the room will see it.
Should you embed fonts, and what does it cost?
Fonts. If a recipient doesn't have the font a deck uses, the text is rendered in a substitute and the layout reflows: line breaks move, a two-line title becomes three, and the slide you spent an hour aligning arrives broken. Embedding the fonts fixes this, and it costs you bytes. Embedding only the characters actually used costs 0.42 MB on this deck. Embedding the full character set costs 3.10 MB, which is 2.68 MB for the ability of a recipient to edit the file in a font they don't own. Embed the subset when you're sending a deck to be read, and the full set only when someone must edit it in your typeface. Font embedding is also the one feature in this list whose availability has historically differed between the Windows and macOS builds (checked September 2026; confirm in your own installation before relying on it for an external send).
What size limit should you design for?
The ceiling. Somebody else sets the limit, and you'll find out at the worst moment. Corporate mail systems commonly reject attachments somewhere between 20 and 25 MB, and the exact number is set per organisation (checked September 2026; confirm with your own administrator). Design for the ceiling before you discover it: resample images once at the end, link large video instead of embedding it, and check the file size before the send, so you never learn the limit from a bounce.