Purging old data from Storyline files

Hi everyone,

My colleague and I are both working on the same project and building an Storyline 360 project. They have the most up to date version of the file in question, and I'm currently on an older version of the file (that's file, not software version).

Now, this is only because he is working on what I guess we can call the "master" file if you will and updating it with a corresponding version number each iteration. I'm, at present, building some additional elements in an older version of the project file with the aim being that my colleague can simply copy and paste the required elements into his "master" version if you will, and save a new version.

Now here's where it gets a bit funny.

To help with transferring the files over to my colleague, I'm deleting all the slides and any unnecessary stuff from my version to reduce the file size. So let's say, as an example, I've edited slides 8, 12 and 16. I then delete all the other slides leaving only those 3 I've done and save it under a different version/name.

The file size of this newly saved file with the unnecessary slides and stuff deleted, is just as big as the original file I was working with, defeating the point of deleting those slides I don't need to reduce the file size when uploading it for my colleague to then download the file later.

It seems that just by "deleting" something, although it disappears from the slide, the data itself is still remaining in the Storyline file. Is there a way to actually remove this data so the file size is reduced?

I ask because the file I'm working from has a load of videos and other multi-media content that I don't need to retain at all when uploading for my colleague to grab the bits I've done for them. It's like that despite deleting half a dozen videos and half a dozen slides, saving it as a new file doesn't reduce the file size.

I should also point out that the reason for doing this is that I want to keep the current template settings and colour palette. I know I could import a template, but of-late I've found this to be a tad hit and miss in specific areas so I didn't want the headache of having to go back through the template master slides and check each one.

Many thanks,

Sam