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Olly Olly Oxen Free: When Your Slides Want to Play Hide and Seek (Part 3)

In part one, we talked about how being able to find the right slide, right when you need it can be pretty important. Especially when you consider the enormous resource investment that can be tied up in creating the perfect slide. Part two looked at how often we end up needing to play slide hide and seek and started to consider why we find ourselves in this situation so often. Some of the problem may be due to a lack of organization. But often, it’s our own work routines that get in the way of easy access to our existing presentation assets.

According to the study conducted by Research Presentation Strategies (RPS), 73% of PPT users store presentations on their desktop or laptop often or very often. While storing presentations on their computer may make them easier to locate and transport, they are not readily available to other team members. For others to access them additional copies of the slides must be sent via email, uploaded to a network or copied via USB or other media.email-440px

Email is the most frequently used method of sharing presentations, used by 90% of PPT users. 61% of overall responders share via email often or very often.

All of these options run the risk of lost files, as well as version conflicts, file corruption and conflicting presentations (two people presenting the same slide with different content to different audiences).

We will be writing more about effective and ineffective presentation management techniques in future posts. We will also be sharing some ideas about how SlideSource can make sure you are getting the most out of the slides you worked so hard to create. In the meantime, please take a moment to let us know in the comments section about any experiences you might have had when searching in the digital playground for that one last slide that refuses to come out of hiding.

Olly Olly Oxen Free: When Your Slides Want to Play Hide and Seek (Part 2)

In part one, we talked about how being able to find the right slide, right when you need it can be pretty important.

If it’s a really great slide, the perfect slide, one worth keeping and recycling into multiple presentations, you and your team most likely invested a significant amount of time, energy, and other resources into creating it. And if you can’t figure out which presentation file, in which folder, on which laptop, the slide is hiding in, it’s worth absolutely nothing.

Given all this (and keeping in mind that a majority of us start new presentations from slides that already exist), HideAndSeek76Percent-02-440pxyou might be surprised to find out that not being able to find the required presentation is more common than you would think.

76% of the responders in a recent study conducted by Research Presentation Strategies (RPS) report having had trouble locating a presentation file they need. 15% say they have trouble locating presentations they need often or very often. This increases to 18% for frequent PPT users (those who edit or create 3 or more presentations a month).

Why is this number so high, why can it often be so hard for us to know exactly where the slides we need to do our work are located? You might assume that some of this is the fault of a particular individual’s organizational skills, and you wouldn’t be wrong. However, it is also very possible that the tools and systems we use to create, share and store our presentation are at least partly to blame.

In part three of this series, we will look at how the work routines of PPT users can play a role in the stress-filled game of slide hide and seek.