Methods for Reducing File Size Updated October 18, 2016

The Memorial Researcher Portal does not allow upload of files greater than 5 MB to its “Attachments” tab. While researchers can attach multiple files to their application, no single file can be greater than 5 MB. To help alleviate this issue, there are a number of ways researchers can reduce the size of a large file so that it can be attached to the “Attachments” tab.

1) Splitting a Single PDF into Multiple Files - If your PDF file is still too large, there are tools within Adobe Acrobat Pro that allow the document to be split into multiple documents.

I. To split a PDF document, open Adobe Acrobat Pro and locate the tools bar located on the right-hand side of the application as seen in the screenshot below. Click on ‘Pages’ and then click ‘Split Document’.

II. This will open up the ‘Split Document’ window (screenshot below) where you can choose to save the document based on the number of pages per document, or by setting the maximum file size per document. We recommend you select the ‘File Size’ option and set it to 4 MB or less and click the ‘OK’ button

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IV. The new documents are then automatically re-named. In the example below, the original name of the original example document was Coastal Erosion in Newfoundland, while the smaller split documents are Coastal Erosion in Newfoundland_Part1, _Part2, etc..

2) Convert to PDF and Reduce – This method requires that you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro.

If you have a large Microsoft Office document (e.g. Excel, Word, PowerPoint) convert it to a PDF file first. To do this…

I. Open the Microsoft document and select the “File” in the top left corner of the screen. Then select “Save as Adobe PDF” as seen in the screenshot below. This will then open a screen which will allow you to name the PDF document.

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II. Once you have given it a filename, the file will then save as a PDF document to the folder you were working in.

III. Now that the document has been saved to a PDF, you can further reduce its file size. To do this, click on ‘File’ at the top left of the screen, and then select ‘Save As Other’ button and then select ‘Reduced Size PDF…’ as seen in the following screenshot below.

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3) Zip the File - Right-click on the file you want to compress. Select “Send to” and then select “Compressed (zipped) folder” as seen in the screenshot below. This will create a zip version of the file in that same folder. This procedure will reduce the file size by about 20%.

4) Scanning to PDF and then Splitting Into Multiple Files – If you need scan a hard- copy document to upload into the Memorial Researcher Portal, we recommend that you scan it to a PDF format and then split the large PDF file into multiple smaller files. This splitting process is described in Section #3 of this document.

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