So Many Slides: An Indezine Conversation with Robert Befus

Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Geetesh Bajaj recently interviewed SlideSource.com’s Bob Befus. Their conversation was posted earlier today on Indezine, Geetesh’s highly regarded presentation-focused website.

The interview (which can be read in its entirety here) covered a number of topics including the challenges of organizing large collections of slides and how slides change as they travel through an organization.

Here are a couple highlights:

… when building presentations, we found that 60% start from an existing set of slides to create a new presentation, so managing versions of presentations is an important part of their work. This is especially true for the 30% of users who work in PowerPoint frequently. The problem is that 76% of all the PowerPoint users who responded said they have trouble locating the slides and presentations they need when they need them.

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While managing files and versions seems like it should be a simple task, when it comes to PowerPoint, it turns out it really isn’t simple at all. That’s because PowerPoint presentations are mutable mobiles, meaning that, unlike a PDF file for example, PowerPoint files change as they travel through an organization.