PowerPoint presentation manager

Clients want an easy way to manage the corporate PowerPoint presentations so that they have a consistent look and feel in line with the corporate brand values.

In response we have developed an addin for PowerPoint allowing the standard slides in the master template (for example company description or biographies) to be managed centrally and available to users throughout the organisation. In that way it is possible to ensure that all the core, or standard slides, are up to date and consistent throughout the company.

Created for both PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, two macro buttons - 'New presentation' and 'New slide(s)' - allow users to access the master corporate presentation and create a new presentation or add slides to an existing presentation.

How the PowerPoint Presentation manager works

The master template contains two types of slides

1. Blank slides - in the corporate style ready for the user to add content for the individual presentation
   eg title page, contents page, single column text, two column text, table slides plus various pre-formatted graph slides (pie, bar, line)
2. Standard corporate slides - these are partially or completely pre-filled slides that contain real up-to-date company information
   eg managers profile slides, company history slides, client list, case studies etc.

These are accessed by a series of buttons on the dedicated tool bar we add to PowerPoint

'New presentation' button
Clicking the button opens a dialog box  allowing users to select from the
range of centrally held slides and order them to create the basis for a new presentation. Clicking on a slide in the list displays a thumbnail of the relevant slide.

Having selected the slides they want users click Create Presentation to create a PowerPoint presentation that they can then use, edit or add to in the normal way.

It is possible to re-open the dialog box and add the more slides from the master presentation.

Audit slides

If you have been working on a presentation for a while you can run the audit feature and check if any of the content slides have been changed. If they have you can update the relevant slide.

Managing the system

The Presentation manager also has an admin tab which can be rolled out to specific authorised users. This allows administrators control and manage the settings and master presentation that is available to users.