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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Bob Befus It’s hard to believe, but SlideSource.com went live and became available to the public six months ago. After more than 20,000 slides have been added to SlideSource, we can say the response has been amazing. It’s been really exciting to be able to bring the industry’s most innovative and easy-to-use slide and presentation library solution to PowerPoint users everywhere.
We’ve spent the last six months fine tuning the tool, improving performance and, most importantly, talking to customers. Last week, we updated the site with a number of improvements. Many of these were on the back-end, but users will also notice a number of other important changes. Chat is now available at any time, so help is just a few keystrokes away. The upload function has been improved. If you are a Mac user, you can now open your slides directly from PowerPoint on the Mac (Safari and Chrome browsers) rather than downloading first.
We’re also excited to announce a number changes to the SlideSource subscription plans. These changes add flexibility and make it easier to start a subscription if you have just a few users. Each plan is now based primarily on the number of users who will need access to your SlideSource.com library. You can then fine tune your subscription plan (and its monthly cost) to meet your needs by specifying the maximum number of slides your library will contain.
All plans include…
- Unlimited slide collections within your library
- Advanced permissions control
- Live phone support
- Our unique system for securely sharing your presentations with colleagues, collaborators, and audiences who don’t have their own SlideSource.com subscriptions
- The ability to raise and lower subscription level and limits at any time
… as well as all of the other great system features that make SlideSource.com the most innovative and efficient tool for managing your PowerPoint slides and presentations.
If you aren’t already a SlideSource.com user, now is a great time to sign up for a free account and give it a try. The free subscription has all of the features and capabilities of the paid subscription levels so you will be able to see exactly what makes SlideSource.com the most innovative and useful presentation management system available.
Bob Befus Managing your subscription is easy in SlideSource.com. From the free account to enterprise level service, there is an option that is just right for you. This post covers information on modifying your subscription level and the number of users. Even if you are using the free subscription and just want to add a few additional users, you can do that by managing your subscription.
Changing your Subscription Level and Number of Users
SlideSource subscription levels provide different numbers of Slide Collections and users, however additional users can be added at any time. To manage your subscription, choose the Manage Library option from your Library Home Page.
At the bottom of your library settings you will see the option to manage your subscription. Here you will see your current subscription tier and all the specifics of your subscription including the number of users you have authorized to use your Library.
To change your subscription settings, use the Edit Subscription button. On the next screen you will be able to change your subscription tier or simply add some users to your current tier.
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.
Bob Befus We believe your presentation content is a valuable asset. In other words, we think every slide really does count. Slides have a lifecycle. They are created, edited, used in a presentation, modified and used in other presentations, and eventually they are retired or replaced. SlideSource was developed to help you manage this lifecycle. At the heart of this lifecycle management is version control of both individual slides, of presentations themselves and the specific versions of slides used in different presentations. This may sound complex, but SlideSource makes it all pretty easy.
Slide Versioning
Slide versioning is accessed through the slide properties page. As you see below, the current version number is shown along with a link to the version history page. Notice that at the bottom you will see what presentations this current version of the slide is used in (click image to enlarge).
Click on the “view version history” link to see a thumbnail of the different versions of the slide available. In this case there are only two versions of this slide.
By clicking on either version you will see the properties page for that version including a list of any presentations that particular version of the slide is used in. You are also able to post comments about any version of your slides. Comments can be used to indicate what has changed on a specific version, or to suggest changes you would like to have made to a slide. Below is an example of a comment on a version.
Comments are a helpful way to collaborate and communicate on slide development. In an upcoming SlideSource Pointer email, we will focus specifically on presentation versioning and the options to choose specific versions of slides in presentations as well as how to lock or save certain versions while still maintaining access to a Working Copy that can be used for further editing.
Bob Befus The “Big Idea” of SlideSource is that every slide counts. Every slide represents an investment of time and energy that should be managed throughout the life cycle of the slide. That is why SlideSource enables you to open your slides to edit them in PowerPoint and tracks the version history of both individual slides and presentations.
There are times when you will want to edit a batch of slides, or perhaps an entire presentation, offline but still want to maintain the version history of each individual slide in your library. SlideSource was designed with exactly this kind of productivity in mind. This post shows you how to edit offline and then update your library with your offline edits.
Offline Editing with SlideSource
SlideSource can only track version histories for slides that have first been uploaded to your library. When a slide is uploaded, a unique identifier is added to the slide metadata which will always be used to identify that slide, even if it is downloaded from the site.
To edit offline, download some slides by using any of the download options. In the example below, I have temporarily added slides to my slide tray and then dragged them to the PPT button (click image to enlarge).
Save the downloaded slides to your computer and open them in PowerPoint to edit as you normally would. When you are ready to update your Library slides with the offline edits, just upload the slides back to SlideSource using any of the upload options. After your slides are uploaded, SlideSource will let you know that it recognizes those slides as ones you already have in your library. You will then be able to decide what you want to do with them.
Select each slide (or all slides with Shift+Click) and then click on one of the available actions. If you choose “Apply Changes,” the existing slides in your library will be updated with these new versions and the previous version will be saved to the history. If you choose “Treat as New,” then the slides you selected will be turned into brand new slides in the library with brand new version histories. Of course, if some slides were included by accident in the file, you can choose to discard those slides. It is okay to include edited slides along with new slides in your upload as SlideSource will let you handle each separately.
Editing offline can make you and your team very productive without giving up the control of your slides that you have come to expect with SlideSource.com.
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