PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Remove Mark as Final Option in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Have you ever received a presentation that doesn’t allow you to make any changes? That could be a password-protected presentation. Alternatively, it could have been Marked as Final. Fortunately, Mark as Final is more of an administrative tool than a security tool — it’s purpose is to make others aware that the author of the presentation doesn’t want others editing this work. First of all you need to make sure that a presentation indeed has a Mark as Final attribute applied. To do that, check the lower left area of the Status Bar at the bottom of the PowerPoint Interface. You should see the Mark as Final icon.

Learn about removing the Mark as Final option for files in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Office 2013, PowerPoint 2013, Share, Tutorials

Outstanding Presentations 2015: Conversation with Mike Parkinson

      Mike Parkinson is an internationally recognized visual communication and presentation guru, solution and strategy expert, award-winning author, and trainer. He is a key contributor on multi-billion dollar projects and helps Fortune 500 companies improve their success rates. Mike shares his expertise through books like Billion Dollar Graphics, articles, and online tools. He is also partner at 24 Hour Company, a premier creative services firm.

In this conversation, Mike discusses his upcoming webinar tomorrow, which he will present as part of the Outstanding Presentations 2015 series.

Geetesh: Tell us more about what you do — and also about how audience perceptions about visuals have changed/evolved over the years?

Mike: My job is to make my clients more successful through their sales, marketing, and education activities and materials. My creative services firm uses a hybrid of training, coaching and consulting to drive results. Proven innovations applied to our field (e.g., the latest behavioral psychology findings) continues to be key.

Visual communication plays an ever-growing role in education and persuasion. In the last five years, there has been a shift in design. The past favored designs that mimicked reality (skeuomorphism). Today, flat/simple designs that often include large photographs and thin fonts are en vogue. The popularity of smartphones and tablets have pushed us toward a “less is more” aesthetic. In the coming years, expect the popular design approach to evolve—usually taking the best of what has come before with a modern spin.

Geetesh: What will you speak about in your session as part of the Outstanding Presentations series – and what would be the takeaway for attendees?

Mike: Attendees learn the five silver bullets that guarantee a successful presentation. It’s easy—when you know how. See almost 50 examples of amazing slides and presentations that demonstrate how to use each of the five silver bullets. Attendees also get my popular Graphic Cheat Sheet (pick the right graphic for your slides) and find websites that offer free and low-cost graphics.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Mike Parkinson, Outstanding Presentations Workshop, PowerPoint, Webinar

Mark as Final in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Do you need to share your presentations with others? If yes, it’s a good idea to make sure that your presentations are set to be read-only before you share them. What you need then is the Mark as Final option in PowerPoint 2013, which makes your file read-only. Note that this option is not as restrictive as password protecting a PowerPoint presentation. The Mark as Final option tries to prevent users from typing, editing commands, and proofing — all editing options are disabled or turned off. However, do remember that Mark as Final is not a security feature and it can be easily reversed by the recipient of your file.

Learn how to apply Mark as Final option to a presentation in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Office 2013, PowerPoint 2013, Share, Tutorials

SlideSource: Conversation with Robert Befus

Bob Befus is passionate about helping scientists and clinicians present the results of their research. In the 1980s, he co-founded Spectrum Multi Media Inc. as a full-service presentation graphics company servicing medical and pharmaceutical organizations. In later years, the company name was changed to Research Presentation Strategies to reflect its focus on helping customers with high profile regulatory and scientific presentations. He has worked in just about every area of presentation graphics—digital presentations, video production and interactive multimedia.

In this conversation, Bob discusses SlideSource, a presentation management tool that lets you organize, develop and share your presentations from one secure online library anytime, anywhere.

Geetesh: Can you briefly tell us more about SlideSource, and what motivated you to create this product?

Bob: We have helped customers develop and deliver sales, marketing, clinical, and regulatory presentations for close to 30 years. Over that time, we became well acquainted with the challenges that individuals, teams, and companies experience while trying to manage all of their presentation content.

While presentation technology has changed dramatically over the last three decades, the systems and tools for managing all of that presentation content have not kept up. In fact, these problems have gotten worse as the creation of slides and presentations has gone from primarily being the domain of specialized design teams and individuals to being a ubiquitous activity performed across all functional areas and levels.

In order to effectively deploy slides and presentations, it’s crucial to know: where the most current version of a slide is (and where all the previous versions of it are), who last edited a slide, what presentations the slide is a part of and where all of those presentations currently reside. It’s also very important to know how to easily make the right slides and presentations available to the right people at the right time. Finally, when you update a slide, you want to be sure that the updated version has been propagated to all presentations that contain that slide.

Through our work over the years helping companies develop very large slide libraries that include 2,000 to 10,000 unique slides, we began developing custom tools to help them organize and manage those slides and presentations. One of those tools eventually became SlideSource which is now available as a cloud service (SlideSource.com) and as the only slide library add-on available for Microsoft’s SharePoint platform (SlideSource SP).

When a presentation is uploaded to SlideSource, the slides in the deck are split into individual PowerPoint files (one slide per file) and these individual files are stored in a slide collection. A slide library can hold many unique slide collections. The individual slides can now be organized by simply dragging and dropping them into any desired folder structure. Individual slides can also be dynamically linked to presentations. This means that when looking at a slide’s properties, users can instantly see all the presentations that include that slide. It also means that if any slide is edited, it is automatically updated in any presentation that includes it.

You can edit slides in PowerPoint directly from your library, track version history and assign search tags to slides. Even when you download slides or a presentation from SlideSource, it maintains its connection to the library. When you re-upload a presentation you edited offline, SlideSource will recognize those slides and update the version history of each slide with the new version.

Geetesh: Who are typical SlideSource users? And can you share a small story about any of these users?

Bob: SlideSource customers range from an individual teacher or professor organizing their teaching slides to a whole medical affairs department of a major pharmaceutical company managing many thousands of clinical slides. I recently met with a customer and the first words out of his mouth when I sat down were, “Bob, we have a slide problem!”

This team was preparing for the global launch of a new product in 2016. While large companies have sophisticated content management systems to manage most of their communication media, presentations seem to fall through the cracks. The team was having trouble making sure that presenters only had access to the most current, approved content. Since presenters were both inside and outside the company, PowerPoint files were often sent via email to users, who often made edits to target the presentation to a specific audience. These presentations were essentially lost from that point on.

Adding a SlideSource library provided a single secure location for all the approved presentation content for the new product launch. The library could be easily managed by a small team and yet all stakeholders, whether inside or outside the company could access it. Permissions were configured based on the user’s need to access or edit presentations.

SlideSource brought order, structure and security to the team’s large and growing library of slides and presentations.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Digital Asset Management, Interviews, PowerPoint, SharePoint, SlideSource

Backstage View – Info Pane in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

In PowerPoint 2013, all information that you need about your currently active presentation is available in a single easily accessible location. This location is the Info pane of Backstage View. Using the options available within this pane, you can access information about permissions set for the active presentation, prepare your content for sharing, and also possibly recover older versions of unsaved files. In addition, the Info pane also provides access to many more properties that we will discuss on this page.

Learn about the various options available in the Info Pane within Backstage view in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: Backstage, Interface, Office 2013, PowerPoint 2013, Tutorials