Organize your slides and presentations like the pros. SlideSource.com was developed over many years working with teams in some of the largest companies in the world who need to manage a large amount of presentation content. Now these same tools are available to every presenter.
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Lee Potts The previous installments of this series described four archetypal co-workers that may be familiar to you — Vickie Versions, Sally Sharer, Sly D’Stroyer, and Louie Lostem. Each is a team member you might not pick if you were the one assembling a presentation team. Even though we’re pretty sure they are perfectly wonderful people most of the time, they can be anything but wonderful to work with when creating or organizing slides and presentations. We would now like you to meet the fifth and final person you will meet when you make presentations…
Harry Hermit
 Harry often seems to find himself in the barren wilderness cut off from the all the benefits of contemporary civilization due to a lack of internet connection. Sometimes it’s because he’s always on a plane or stuck in the middle of nowhere visiting remote client sites. Sometimes Harry is just the kind of guy who insists that his dial-up AOL internet access works “just fine.â€
Whether he’s an intrepid explorer or a neo-luddite, Harry often needs to download shared presentation files to work on them offline and away from the team. What happens when Harry returns from his sojourns in the geographic or technological hinterlands? How can the work he did while he was away be integrated back into what the team has been doing?
Even though SlideSource is an innovative cloud-based solution to presentation management problems, it still works just fine for folks who find themselves disconnected from the cloud. Harry can easily download slides from SlideSource and work on them offline. Then when he returns from the wilderness, windblown and badly in need of a shave, he can easily upload the slides back into SlideSource.
The best part is, SlideSource will automatically recognize his slides and will return them to exactly the same place they came from, making Harry’s version the latest and greatest while retaining all the versions that came before. All tags and other information associated with the slide in SlideSource will remain, and if the updated slide is part of any presentation in SlideSource, it will be automatically updated. SlideSource will even know if anyone else has edited the slide while Harry was working offline and will help him resolve the version conflicts.
Have any of the fine folks we have introduced you to over the last couple of months reminded you, even a little, of someone you know? It’s hard to imagine working in a collaborative environment for any length of time without having the pleasure of sharing a project with someone who at least resembles one of them. SlideSource.com can easily accommodate your co-worker’s (or boss’s) quirks. It can also lessen the negative impact that any other slide management challenges might have on your team’s performance. We invite you to take a few minutes to visit SlideSource.com, sign up for a free, full-featured trial account, and see for yourself.
Lee Potts The previous installments of this series introduced you to three archetypal team members you might not pick if you were the one picking the team — Vickie Versions, Sally Sharer, and Sly D’Stroyer. Even though they are basically good people (they don’t kick puppies or steal candy from babies, as far as we know), they can be very painful to work with when a team is trying to make or organize slides and presentations. Today, we would like you to meet the forth member of this rogues gallery of challenging co-workers…
Louie Lostem
 Losing hours of work due to PowerPoint ineptitude (thanks Sly) is one thing, losing them because Louie Lostem lost the slides is another. Right now, the file your team desperately needs to make a big deadline is on a thumb drive, in the left front pocket of his favorite skinny jeans, at his dry cleaners, 20 miles from the office. At least Louie’s pretty sure that’s exactly where it is.
It might also be lost in an electronic sort of way somewhere in a cryptically named folder on his laptop. Or maybe the company’s server. Or maybe it’s on Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive, SpiderOak, or any of the other half dozen personal cloud storage accounts he uses on a strictly arbitrary basis.
SlideSource.com keeps all your slides in a centrally located, cloud-based content library that is easily accessible by all the members of your team, all the time. This means that your crucial files will never end up in the pocket of anyone’s jeans and you will always know exactly where the latest and greatest version of every slide and presentation can be found. SlideSource also supports tagging of individual slides and has a robust search function so slides are easy to find — even within the system.
It’s very possible you may be working with Louie Lostem right now. If that’s the case, please take a few minutes to visit SlideSource.com, sign up for a free, full-featured trial account, and see how it can help your team find its way to the project’s conclusion.
Lee Potts In the previous installments of this series, we met Vickie Versions and her good friend Sally Sharer – two team members you might not pick if you were the one picking the team. We established that even though they are perfectly nice people, some of their work habits, especially those related to developing presentations in a collaborative environment, leave a little to be desired.  This week, we introduce you to another of their archetypal co-workers…
 Sly D’Stroyer
 Whether it’s his lack of PowerPoint skills, or his complete inability to grasp even the most basic of technological or aesthetic concepts, no slide or presentation file is safe once he starts to work on it.
A plaintive cry of “Sly! What happened to the slides!!??†can often be heard echoing from cubical to cubical as coworkers sob into their keyboards, faced with another hopelessly corrupted file or another slide that has metamorphosed from a clean, perfectly formatted gem into a jumbled mess of words, numbers, and graphic chaos that would send Tufte to an early grave.
Oh, and Sly also seems to have difficulty putting the right data in the right place when updating slides.
The crucial question then becomes, how hard is it to roll back to the previous version of the slide? Is it easy for your team to find and repair/replace the slide or slides that Sly wrecked? Is it a worst case scenario where he overwrote the only copy of the file while he was making his “minor improvements?†The answer to these questions determine just how much time and energy Sly has cost the project.
SlideSource.com can really help a team quickly get things back to where they should be once Sly has finished making his edits. With its slide-level change history, SlideSource.com preserves every version of every slide as well as all the information necessary to know who did exactly what to each slide as well as exactly when they did it. You can quickly and easily roll back to any previous version if necessary.
It’s very possible you may be working with Sly D’Stroyer right now. If that’s the case, please take a few minutes to visit SlideSource.com, sign up for a free, full-featured trial account, and see how it can keep your team’s destroyer from sinking your project.
Lee Potts Last week we kicked off this series of posts by introducing you to Vickie Versions, a team member you might not pick if you were the one picking the team. Oh, Vickie’s nice enough in general but, unfortunately, she has a pronounced predilection for making endless changes to her slides whether they need to be changed or not. This week we will be meeting Vickie’s closest friend and office ally…
Sally Sharer
 Sally is also a very nice person but can cause many of the same sort of productivity problems as Vickie because, generous to a fault, she has yet to see a set of slides that shouldn’t be shared. Either she’s requesting comment/approval, asking for additional data, looking for help formatting, or even just “keeping everyone in the loop,” Sally emails presentation files hither and yon with joyful abandon and, sometimes, for no apparent reason at all.
We’ve blogged before about the hazards inherent in emailing slide files around:
Emailing slide files for review, approval, production, or any other collaborative activity can be bad. Email is the sworn enemy of version control. It’s very easy to lose track of slides once released into the wild. You can never control how the file is going to be returned or when. You won’t know how many versions will need to be reconciled or which set of changes take precedence over the others.
On top of all of the usual version control issues, Sally often overlooks the potential for serious security breaches that can occur because she is transmitting confidential or proprietary information via email.
Sally and her co-workers could really benefit by moving all of their presentation files into SlideSource.com. Sally could rest easy knowing that everyone on her team will see her slides because they are available in a single, centralized location. Everyone else will rest much easier because that centralized location is highly secure and simple to use. Equally important, SlideSource.com has rigorous version control built in so no one will ever have to figure out where the most up-to-date slide is.
It’s very possible you may be working with Sally Sharer right now. Or perhaps you recognize just a little bit of Sally in yourself. If that’s the case, please take a few minutes to visit SlideSource.com, sign up for a free, full-featured trial account. Once you’ve had a chance to see how it can make your slides both accessible and secure, you’ll want to invite the rest of the team to share in the fun.
Lee Potts As we like to point out here at SlideSource.com, presentation creation is often a team activity. And, as we all know, in the work-a-day world you don’t always get to pick your teammates. In this series of posts, we’re going to introduce you to a few folks you might meet as you work to develop that all-important presentation, starting with:
Vickie Versions
 For Vickie, change is the only constant, so her slides constantly change. This drives her teammates a little crazy because she keeps her slides on her laptop and distributes them via email. With all these versions of her slide deck floating around, no one knows who has the current version. Even Vickie herself gets version vertigo on occasion.
Even Vickie sometimes accidentally updates the wrong version of her slides and adds to the chaos. When different team members are all working on different versions of slides, it means someone is going to have to sort it all out…. and you can bet it probably won’t be Vickie.
We think Vickie and her team would find SlideSource.com really helpful. All of Vickie’s slides would be maintained in a single, secure, centralized location. She can open any slide from within SlideSource.com and make changes to her heart’s content knowing that when she’s done there will be no confusion about who has the most up-to-date version or where it can be found. The team can rest easy knowing that SlideSource.com retains every version of every slide; keeping each one safe but behind the scenes so it’s out of the way but easy to get to. And every time Vickie updates a slide used in multiple presentations, they will all be updated automatically (if she wants them to be).
It’s very possible that you find yourself working with a Vickie Versions right now. Or perhaps you even recognize just a little bit of Vickie in yourself. If that’s the case, please take a few minutes to visit SlideSource.com, sign up for a free, full-featured trial account, and see everything it can do to make your presentation production process a faster, more efficient version of itself.
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