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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SlideSource: New Year, New Features – Part 1

In January, SlideSource celebrated its third birthday and added two thousand new users to our rapidly expanding community. Our continued growth as the industry’s best slide management system is largely due to the fact that we listen carefully to our users and continually innovate based on what they tell us.

As part of this innovation process, we are currently deploying several new features, functions, and improvements that make it even easier to take control of your slides and presentations. In part one of this two-part series, we will be looking at features that help you find and organize your slides (be sure to check out the screen capture gallery at the end of this article for additional details).

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Using SlideSource to manage your presentation content means that all of your slides and presentations are finally located in one place. You no longer have to guess which PowerPoint file, in which folder on what USB drive, computer, or cloud server has the slide you are looking for. Equally important, each slide now has useful metadata attached to it. This metadata includes information like who edited a slide most recently and when those changes were made, as well as things like user generated comments and tags. Combining this with the built-in search function makes finding, managing, and actually using all of your organization’s slides much more efficient.

Enhanced Search Options

From the beginning, the SlideSource search function has been powerful — letting users search specifically in the slide title, text, or notes content as well as in the editor and tags metadata fields.  With the enhancements recently released, users can now search all metadata fields including any custom fields created by the user.

Unlimited Custom Metadata Fields

Users can now add as many custom fields as they want to the metadata attached to each of their slides. Available metadata field types include one line text, multi-line rich text, date/time, and drop down list.

This is a very powerful feature that can be used in many ways. For example, you may want to have a field tracking the source of the information on the slide, or the type of content on the slide, or the date when the information presented becomes invalid, or even the slide’s intended audience. A slide in a PowerPoint file is just a slide, but a slide with your custom metadata attached becomes a valuable asset to your organization.

Improved Search Tag Management

The SlideSource search tag is a special kind of metadata specially designed to be added to slides very quickly. Our recent update makes it even easier to find all the slides and presentations in a library that have been assigned a particular search tag and the tag management interface has been improved to make it easy to rename tags across all of the slides in the library.

For instance, you want to be able to easily track down a number of slides that you feel are important and give them the search tag “IMPORTANT.” However, a co-worker feels the slides are actually crucial and insists that the tag be changed. Renaming the “IMPORTANT”tag to “CRUCIAL” on the tag management page will then update all of the slides with the new tag without having to go to each slide and making the change manually.

Custom Stamps

One of Slide Source’s most unique and features has been the ability to “stamp” slides with a watermark indicating the slide’s owner within the organization as well as its current status in the approval process. Our recent update has expanded this capability so that users can now create custom stamps that appear either on their slides or off to the side of the slide. These stamps are added to the slides when they are downloaded. Users can pick the font, font size, color and location of the stamp. The stamps can be used to display things like approved use information, quality control review status, unique ID numbers or even global confidentiality messages without having to open and edit every single slide.

In the next post, we will review new features that will help you to keep track of what’s going on with your slides and presentations which is very important when you are working in a hectic, collaborative environment.

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.

Click on image to enlarge.

I wish you hadn’t said that…

Here are some examples of what you might call “unintentional foreshadowing”:

  • We don’t need to tape down that cable. No one’s going over there.
  • I’m pretty sure everyone has that font.
  • It’s a brand new projector. Why should we spend that much money on a backup bulb?
  • They had a pipe burst the last time we did a meeting there. There’s no way anything like that can happen again.
  • Don’t worry, this guy is really good, he doesn’t need rehearsal.
  • Of course she’s using the official slide template you sent her last month.
  • Just leave it there, no one is going to mess with it.
  • I’m sure it’s safe to use that indoors.
  • Don’t worry, it’s supposed to do that…

Did any of these invoke a sense of foreboding for you? Does the sound of someone tempting fate set off alarm bells?

Phrases like “I’m pretty sure”, “there’s no way”, “don’t worry”, and “of course” can be your friends. Recognize these little understated warnings for what they are, determine if the easy dismissal they represent conceals a genuine risk, and do a little preemptive follow up if necessary to head off any problems.

Have you ever said or been within earshot of someone else saying something that turned out, in retrospect, to be unfortunately prophetic?

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Tweets of the Week – June 9, 2017

Every day, we post two or three carefully curated presentation-, public speaking-, and dataviz-related items to our Twitter feed (@SlideSource). Here are our favorites from the past week…






Tweets of the Week – May 19, 2017

Every day, we post two or three carefully curated presentation-, public speaking-, and dataviz-related items to our Twitter feed (@SlideSource). Here are our favorites from the past week…







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Imagine 22,000 people asking, “Now where did I leave that USB stick?”

If you regularly use USB sticks to backup or transport presentation files, I’m guessing you have asked yourself this question at least once in your career (perhaps with an increasing sense of panic as you run out of places you haven’t searched).  How many times have you found the stick in clothes already in the hamper? How many times have you never been able to find it at all?

A recent study found that over 22,000 USB sticks get left at the dry cleaners on an annual basis. And that’s just in the U.K. This number is even more sobering when you consider that the study also revealed almost half of these sticks never get returned to their owner.

This can be a major problem for several reasons. For instance, a PowerPoint file on that missing stick may be the only copy of the high-profile presentation you are scheduled to deliver tomorrow morning. It might contain highly sensitive or proprietary content. Given the risks, your best bet is to avoid relying on portable data storage altogether.

SlideSource.com keeps all your slides in a secure, 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 a bin beneath your dry cleaner’s counter 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.

Take a few minutes to visit SlideSource.com, sign up for a free, full-featured trial account, and see how easy it is to guarantee that your presentation doesn’t get taken to the cleaners.

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