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.
Bob Befus Staying competitive in almost any business or industry requires finding the most efficient way to get from the beginning of a task or project to its completion. We are constantly taking steps to find the quickest, most direct route from point A to point B.
 When PCs, PowerPoint and digital projectors became widely available, it no longer made sense to shoot, develop, mount, and place physical, 35mm slides into a carousel in order to support a presentation.
But even though PowerPoint made the process of making presentations faster, more flexible, and more cost effective, it still has some room for improvement. There are limitations built into a PowerPoint-based workflow, can throw up big obstacles in your way when trying to create and maintain presentations as a team.
PowerPoint saves slides in a presentation or “deck” of slides. While you can apply version control to the whole presentation, there is no simple way to see how an individual slide has changed over time or who made those changes. There is no practical way to revert to an earlier version of a slide without scouring through past decks and then copying and pasting the old version into your current deck. There is also no record of which version of a slide is in any particular version of a slide deck.
If someone is working on a slide in a PowerPoint presentation, that deck is not (or should not) be available to other team members to edit in at the same time. Unless, that is, multiple people are working on the same file at the same time, which often happens and almost always creates version control nightmares for everyone.
Another big roadblock to productivity occurs when the same slide is used in different presentations. If the slide is updated, it has to be tracked down in every version of every presentation that uses that slide or you risk being surprised by an old version of a slide popping up in the middle of your presentation. PowerPoint doesn’t provide a way to link multiple instances of the same slides across files.
How do you breakthrough PowerPoint productivity roadblocks? The best way is to use a collaborative presentation management tool like SlideSource.com.
With SlideSource.com, you upload your existing presentation files into a secure library where all your presentations are maintained as individual slides that can be easily organized into folders.
The really great part is that every version of every slide is retained so it’s simple to see how a slide has evolved overtime and you can revert to a previous version at any time. Properties such has who made a change and when it was made are also recorded and retained for each version of every slide.
Presentations are built within SlideSource.com using an intuitive drag and drop interface, or created automatically when you upload files. When you look at a slide’s properties, you will see a list of every presentation (and each version of a presentation) that includes that slide. Best of all, whenever slides are updated it is also automatically updated in every presentation they are in.
Working on a slide no longer means getting in the way of everyone else that needs to work on the presentation at the same time because you no longer need to lock the entire file for your exclusive access. This means that a presentation with 100 slides could potentially have 100 people working on it at the same time.
PowerPoint eradicated many, many roadblocks that once slowed the presentation creation process down to what we would now consider an intolerable crawl. Compared to the speed of current technology, it was a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam that many people working today don’t even remember and can barely imagine.
But managing slides and presentations can still be quite a challenge for teams who deal with a lot of presentation content. If you find yourself blocked or frustrated by production roadblocks…. give SlideSource.com a try for free and see how fast you and your team can really go.
Bob Befus One of the central tenants of productive presentation collaboration is effective version control. SlideSource.com supports version control of individual slides as well as version control of your presentations. This SlideSource Pointer highlights how to manage your presentation versions.
Working Copies
When you create a presentation and drag slides from your Slide Library to it, what you are doing is creating a working copy of your presentation. This working copy is automatically updated as the individual slides are updated. There are times, however, when you will want to save or lock a specific version of the presentation. When you save a version of your presentation that version will no longer be automatically updated if your slides continue to change. You might save a version to be presented to a specific audience or a version you reviewed at a meeting with senior management.
Selecting the Version of Slides to Include
 When building a presentation in SlideSource, the default mode is to always include the latest version of the slides in the presentation. By using the default mode, the working copy of your presentation will always show the most recent copy of any slides you have added to it. This means that as you continue to edit the individual slides, your presentation is always up to date.
There are times when you may want to choose a previous version of a slide to include in a presentation instead of the most current version.
To do this, just click on the Slide Version button and choose the version you want to use for the presentation. In the image to the left, version 1 of the slide is selected to be included in the presentation.
This slide will no longer be updated in the Working Copy of this presentation, even if the slide is edited in your Slide Library.
Usually, you will want your Working Copy to always reflect the current version, and then save versions of the presentation as a whole to lock in slide versions.
The slide and presentation versioning features in SlideSource.com provide many options for keeping you in control as you develop and collaborate on your presentations.
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