Large Powerpoint File Size

Does anyone know why Powerpoint file sizes in Office 2011 are so large? I have a 24 slide presentation that is only text (images etc. to be added later). I went to email it to my colleagues and found it was 4.5MB. Thinking that can't be right, I did a little searching and tried changing around the save settings, but it always saved it as a 4.5MB file size even though I have no images, graphs, charts, or anything but text in the presentation.

So I rebooted into Windows 7, loaded up the file in Powerpoint for Windows, saved it and I came out with a 612KB file size. 612KB. Is there any reason why Powerpoint for Mac is adding nearly 4MB to the file size? I'd so much rather work in OSX, but it seems rather ridiculous that Powerpoint for Mac is making the files so huge.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

GGJstudios said:

Are you using a slide background? Embedding fonts? Both can increase file size. If you only need text, why not use TextEdit? If you routinely share files of this size, you can use Dropbox or online file sending services, rather than emailing.

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Thanks very much for your response. There is a slide background as part of our internal theme, but it seems strange to me that Windows would save it with the background as 612KB while OS X saves it as 4.5MB. I don't have any embedded fonts or anything else. I'd love to be able to use online services like Dropbox for work, unfortunately the nature of my organization prohibits their use. I did a little more searching and it seems that others have experienced a similar problem with Office 2011, so hopefully I can find some answers somewhere. Thanks again!