It really depends on your available system resources. If you are running a
386 at 25 MHz, with 16 Meg of RAM then, yea, you are going to have problems.
If you are running a P4 at 3.1 GHz and 1Gig RAM, then a file of 200 slides
(that is 40 Megs) is nothing (assuming you do not have the computer doing
too many background tasks).
I run a 1 GHz processor with 512Meg RAM and routinely build and show 200+
slide (30+ Meg) presentations. If your system is close to this, than you
should be able to do the same. Let your system tell you if you are pushing
it. Look for slow loads and jumpy animations/transitions. Look for the
system not keeping up on the display, and listen for excessive Hard Drive
page swapping. If your system is struggling with your presentation, try
making your file smaller, or increasing the amount of RAM.
As far as I have seen posted, the most slides in a presentation is in the
tens of thousands.
(An experiment to see if there was a top number)
The largest show size I've heard of was over 1.3 Gigs (yes, Gigs --1,300
Megabytes).
(Hundreds of over-scanned pictures)
You do not want your presentation to get close to either of these, unless
you are running a Multi-Cray.
Remember that you can join two presentations together seamlessly, so if one
gets too big, you can break it into 2 smaller halves. Most pictures contain
more detail than can be displayed, the excess bloats your file and can be
eliminated without presentation quality loss.
Let us know if we can help further,
B