The email that kept bouncing
You've spent the better part of an afternoon putting together a proposal. It's thorough — charts, screenshots, a few scanned signatures — and by the time you've exported it, the PDF clocks in at 18 MB. Your client's email server has a 10 MB attachment limit, and it keeps bouncing back.
You don't want to remove anything. The charts matter. The scanned pages are necessary. You just need it to be smaller.
You drop the file into the PDF compressor, pick "Recommended," and click compress. Twelve seconds later, the same document is 4.1 MB. You check it — everything still looks sharp on screen, the text is clear, the charts are readable.
You send it. It goes through first try. The client replies within the hour.