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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 1)

You and your team worked long and hard on creating the elusive perfect slide. It makes the key point of your argument elegantly and convincingly. Audiences respond to it. Your boss loves it. Every single stakeholder has approved.

Where is it?

There are a handful of less perfect versions of the slide that lead up to the ultimate, perfect version. These lesser versions are scattered, along with the version you need, among several presentation files that reside on at least four different laptops, one of which is now in in a bag under a seat on a plane flying in the vicinity of Kalamazoo.

That’s a lot of hiding places.

You checked your email but there were so many versions of the presentation emailed to so many people, it’s not entirely clear which contains the final, perfect, blessed-by-upper-management version of the slide. At this point, you are basically beating the bushes.

Hours of discussion, thought and PowerPoint expertise have been invested in this slide and, until you can track it down, it is worth exactly nothing.

Admittedly, this is an extreme scenario, but, if you have spent any part of your career creating or delivering presentations, you have most likely had to deal with not being able to locate or access a slide you need.

In a recent study conducted by Research Presentation Strategies (RPS), it was found that 60% of the responders that use PowerPoint in their work start from existing slides when creating not-from-scratcha new presentation. This response jumps to 72% for the subgroup of frequent PowerPoint users (those who edit or create 3 or more presentations a month).

Being able to find the right slide, right when you need it, can be pretty important.

In part two of “Olly Olly Oxen Free,” we will take a closer look at some of the results of the RPS study to get a clearer picture of how many of us have found ourselves playing a not-so-fun game of hide and seek with our missing slides.