FILEminimizer Office

Do you have fat Microsoft Office files clogging up your hard disk? Do you want to send Office files that are too big for your mail service to handle? Then FILEMinimizer Office can give you help. It shrinks Excel, Powerpoint, and Word files--without their losing their integrity--so you can e-mail or use them as you'd like. Simply choose the files you want to shrink, click a button, and the job gets done.

Vendor Balesio's Web site claims that FILEMinimizer Office shrinks files up to 98%; in my tests, the results were generally in the 25% to 30% range. Still, even 25% to 30% can help. For a Word document, that might not mean much, but for a PowerPoint presentation, that often means several megabytes.

The only real drawback to FILEMinimizer Office is its price. $45 is pretty steep if you only need to shrink files occasionally. But if you need to regularly shrink files, it's worth a try.

Note: You can use the demo version to compress five files--or 12 if you register--for free.

--Preston Gralla