3 Signs Your Presentations Are Out of Control

Many of the difficulties that occur when using PowerPoint can be traced back to the way it has so completely infiltrated almost every aspect of the corporate world.  You would be hard pressed to find a knowledge worker or college student that doesn’t have as least a passing knowledge of how to use it. 47% of respondents in a recent Research Presentation Strategies (RPS) survey said they use PowerPoint as a regular part of their job. That represents 26 million people in the US, and an awful lot of presentations. Working with PowerPoint files in todays highly networked and connected world can present some unique challenges that can result in a lot of frustration, not to mention wasted time and money. PowerPoint slides are easy to create, edit, and project, but they are also extremely easy to duplicate, delete, damage, and misplace. You might say that digital presentation files are “slippery”. They can be hard to manage and easy to lose. The problem gets compounded when a team of people are working together to build, organize, and use presentations.

Here are three signs that your slide and presentation management is slipping out of control:

1) Once again, you find yourself desperately looking for that slide or presentation you know you made a few months ago.

More is not always better. Knowledge workers have many, many options available to them for saving and storing their work. There are so many places for you to stash a slide, it can be easy to forget exactly where you put it. As we mentioned in a previous blog post, 76% of the responders in the RPS study have trouble locating presentation files.  SlideSource.com is a new, powerful, cloud-based slide and presentation library that eliminates the possibility of ever losing another slide. Just upload all your slides and drag them into folders to organize them. Once in SlideSource.com, all your slides and presentations will be in one place, always available and always easy to locate through a robust search interface that allows you to search by keyword, slide title, slide content and more.

2) Your presentation starts in 5 minutes and the slide you need is on a USB drive in your colleague’s pants pocket… at the dry cleaners.

For most of us, collaboration is a key aspect of what it takes to get our job done. Digital presentation tools like PowerPoint have supercharged our ability to collaborate by making it relatively easy to work with your team on a presentation. In order to get simultaneous work done when teams are geographically dispersed, the presentation is usually divided up and sent around in sections to different team members. Getting all the pieces back can be a challenge. When you do get them back, there is the chance for version errors, template problems and even file corruption.  SlideSource.com solves this problem by creating a truly collaborative environment where you and your team members organize and edit slides from a central, shared library that can be accessed from anywhere. Your co-workers may be not be available, but the work they have done on their slides and your presentation will be.

3) Surprise! A new version of the presentation just landed in your mailbox — now you’ve wasted a whole morning finalizing the wrong presentation.

Version control. Are there any other two words more likely to drive you to despondency when coordinating with a team to create a presentation?  File distribution via email increases the likelihood that you will have version problems. You may be able to control who you send a file to, but you can never completely control who they, send it to (or when this new mystery copy will be returned to you). SlideSource.com keeps a single copy of each of your slides in a central location that is accessible to everyone on your team so you always know where the latest and greatest version of each slide is and you always know it is firmly in your control. When team members edit their slides in SlideSource.com the presentation is automatically updated with their changes. And if team members download and edit a presentation offline… no problem at all. SlideSource.com knows your slides are offline and will update the version history for you when they are re-uploaded to the library.

With so many people creating so many PowerPoint files, who has time to waste looking for missing slides or dealing with version issues. SlideSource.com was designed from the ground up to make managing your PowerPoint slides and presentations easy and efficient. SlideSource.com is currently in a public beta and is launching next month.

Make every slide count with SlideSource.com.