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.