In a business environment, be that working for yourself in a home office or in the cubicle jungle of a multi-national conglomerate, productivity and efficiency can mean the difference between failure and success, or even your level of insanity.
The folks at Balesio know this. Based in Switzerland, Balesio was founded in 1998.
Balesio’s vision is to always provide the highest value to our customers by developing high quality, intuitive standard software which meets our customers’ needs. Our mission is to grow together with its employees, customers and partners to become the first address for small and large companies for high quality, intuitive standard software.
Powerpoint presentations and even Word and Excel docs can get pretty large when loaded up with photos, charts and graphs. A 10 meg PPT can’t be emailed in many cases, necessitating an archival utility like 7-Zip, WinRAR or Winzip. However, wouldn’t it be nice if this capability was built into MS Office?
Balesio thinks so, too, so they have create a very slick add-on for MS Office called FILEminimizer than can reduce the size of your Office docs by up to 98%
I can hear it now: “What about MS Office’s “compress pictures” feature? Belesio has an answer for this.
FILEminimizer will achieve significantly better results than the "Compress Pictures" feature in Microsoft Office. This is because FILEminimizer intelligently selects the most appropriate format and compression level for each image in your document, spreadsheet or presentation, while the "Compress Pictures" feature merely reduces the image resolution and discards any hidden information. Additionally FILEminimizer allows you to flatten any embedded documents in your file.
Without leaving Office, you can compress and/or archive any Word, Excel or PP file created using Office 97 through 2007 including the newer .*X documents. FILEminimizer can then email your file with any MAPI-enabled email solution including Outlook 2000 on up.
Here’s the kicker: unlike the aforementioned utilities, You can compress and send your documents without worry that the recipient will not have the skill or software to decompress and view the document. The original file format is preserved.
We tested FILEminimizer with Office 2007. After creating a DOCX file, heavy with JPEGs, two clicks and about 5 seconds gave me an 82% smaller file, still in the DOCX format, and opened Outlook for emailing. Drag-and-drop is also supported.
FILEminimizer works by compressing the non-text portions of your work, so there are 3 compression settings to choose from depending on whether you intend to print, view on screen, or email. There are also custom settings for the more particular among us.
Another cool point is that while FILEminimizer functions as an MS Office add-on, it runs just as well as a stand-alone, permitting you to use all of the program’s features regardless of your productivity suite. For example, OpenOffice, StarOffice and Google Docs are capable of creating many MS Office-compatible files, and FILEminimizer is ready to help whether you use any Win-OS from 98 to Vista.
The files, after being compressed by FILEminimizer, can still be edited. Structure and layout is NOT affected. Your original file is also spared, and not modified in any way.
FILEminimizer has a trial ver, with a limited number of uses, enough to determine it’s worth, I’m sure. A full registered version will run you around 45USD for a single user home license.
Other features:
- Compact Edition for running from a flash drive on workstations with no admin access.
- Compatible partially, with Macs.
- Server Edition available, covers all workstations on the licensed network.
- SDK available.
- Batch processing.
- MSI package available for SM or Altiris deployment.
- Explorer integration. (Right click)
Note: I am waiting to hear back from Balesio about Windows 7 compatibility.
Disclosure: Balesio provided Winextra with a full version of FILEminimizer for evaluation purposes.
Related posts:
