A deck is built on one machine with one set of fonts and one screen size. Sharing it means every one of those assumptions meets a recipient who does not share them.
This guide covers the three failures and which route fixes each.
Fonts
A presentation references fonts by name rather than carrying them.
On a machine without the typeface, something is substituted. The substitute has different character widths, so a headline that fitted on one line now takes two, a text box overflows, and a carefully aligned layout shifts.
It is a common reason a deck looks wrong to a recipient, and it is invisible to the sender, who has the fonts.
Embedding fonts at save time fixes it for the editable file, at the cost of a larger file and subject to the font licence.
Size
Decks carry images at whatever resolution they were pasted in at, and encoding an attachment adds 33%.
So a 20MB deck leaves as about 27MB and is rejected by a server advertising 25MB. Corporate limits can be lower, and a rejected message does not always produce a clear bounce.
PowerPoint and most presentation tools have a compress-images function. It can shrink the file considerably with little visible difference on a screen, so it is a sensible first step regardless of how you send it.
| Editable file | Address | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Editable | Yes | No | No |
| Fonts correct | Only if embedded | Yes | Yes |
| Size limit | Your mail limit | Your mail limit | None |
| Opens on a phone | Downloads | Downloads | Opens |
| Animations | Yes | No | Depends |
| Correct after sending | No | No | Yes |
Phones
Some recipients will open the deck on a phone first.
The file downloads, opens in whichever application is installed, and renders slides designed for a projector at hand size. Whether builds and transitions play depends on the app, and fonts can be substituted again.
The recipient is looking at your deck through several layers of degradation, and their impression of the content is formed through it.
Pick the route by what they are doing
Editing. Send the editable file. Compress the images and embed the fonts. This is the only case where the working file is the right artefact.
A system requires a file. Send a PDF. Fonts embedded, layout fixed, smaller, opens almost everywhere.
Reading. Send an address. No size limit, no download, opens on a phone, reflows, and correctable after sending.
Many recipients are only reading, yet decks are often sent as editable files. That mismatch is the problem.
Correcting it afterwards
The wrong figure on slide nine, spotted an hour after sending.
With a file, that is an apology and a version two that half the recipients never open, while the other half keep quoting the original.
With an address, it is an edit. Everyone who opens the link, including people it was forwarded to, sees the corrected version.
For anything with numbers in it going to people who matter, that alone decides the route.
Two neighbouring cases are worth a look: How to share a presentation and How to share a digital presentation.
Put it at an address
Work out whether they are editing or reading, compress the images either way, embed fonts on the editable file, send a PDF when a file is demanded, and send an address to everyone who is only reading.
Then the deck arrives looking the way you built it.