Too many PowerPoint files, too little time

Like many who work inside of a large organization, I frequently find myself swamped in a deluge of PowerPoint files. As if I didn’t have enough of my own slides, I also have decks from my teammates and presentations delivered to my organization. The morass of slides can be quite frightening, if I think about it too much.

And, also because I work inside a large organization, I occasionally create and deliver PowerPoint presentations. With the plethora of slides at my disposal, I do what any clever presentation designer would do: I steal … err, borrow heavily from other presentations. Whenever I create a presentation, I think about the slide content, custom themes, or custom animation that I’ve seen previously and want to reuse.

But here’s the problem: with so many PowerPoint files taking up so much space on my local machine, I could (and have) spent hours of my life opening slide decks, scanning them for the slides I want, not finding them, closing them, and repeating the process all over again. Due to the sheer time-cost of this process, I often just redesign the slide myself while cursing my inability to create a meaningful file management system.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Slide Library

One day while I was creating a presentation in PowerPoint 2007, I decided to try out the Reuse Slides feature. When I looked at the Reuse Slides task pane, I noticed a curious option. Upon further investigation, I discovered that this wonderful feature (available to me at the crossroads of SharePoint and PowerPoint) offers a sinfully easy method for storing, categorizing, and sharing slides. More importantly, it is way better than chewing up my hard disk space with .pptx’s.

And thus I discovered Slide Libraries. And lo, a chorus of angels did sing.

Since my large organization has MOSS installed, I have my very own My Site. Immediately after I learned about Slide Libraries, I set one up for myself. Now, whenever I create or receive a presentation, I immediately publish the slides to my Slide Library on My Site. Once the slides are there, I can add descriptions to them, I can send links to individual slides in the library for my team members, and I can even track version history for each slide.

Most of all, with the Slide Library I no longer have to spend hours hunting through slide decks to find the one or two slides I need for my presentations. I can browse thumbnail images of my entire slide library, all from within the PowerPoint 2007 client. Now I can borrow slides from other presentations at will.

(If you’d like to hear and see more about using Slide Libraries to create a presentation from the MOSS side of things, Watch this: Create a presentation from slides in a slide library.)

You, too, can create a Slide Library

Now let me get one thing clear up front: I’m not what you might call a “SharePoint savvy” guy. But the process for setting up a Slide Library on My Site was very straight-forward.

First, I opened up my profile on the corporate intranet. Then, I clicked Site Actions and then clicked Create.

Which then led me to this page …

On the New page, I entered in a name for the slide library, whether I want the link to this library to show up in Quick Launch, and if I want to keep a version of each slide after editing. After I was done, I got this:

My new Slide Library, “Slide Libraries Rule.”

So now I have a blank Slide Library. Yay! But I hear some of you asking the obvious question “That’s great, but how do I populate the Slide Library with slides?”

Well never fear, because you have the option to either Upload slides directly to the Slide Library from the site (see the graphic above), or you can publish slides to your Slide Library from with PowerPoint.

To do that, open the presentation that you want to publish to your Slide Library in PowerPoint 2007. Click the Office Button in the top left corner, point to Publish, and click Publish Slides. You’ll then see the Publish Slides dialog box:

Select all the slides that you want in your Slide Library, and click Publish.

Then go to your Slide Library and you will see the slides you just added:

Like these slides? You can download these slides in the Static text effects for PowerPoint slides template on Office Online.

So now that you’ve created a Slide Library and added slides to it, it’s time to take it out for a test drive. Do you remember that Reuse Slides feature in PowerPoint that I mentioned earlier? That’s where we can access the Slide Library from inside PowerPoint.

To reuse slides from your Slide Library, on the Home tab, in the Slides group, click the arrow button below New Slide, and select Reuse Slides. Then, in the Reuse Slides task pane, click Open a Slide Library, navigate to your Slide Library, and click Select.

Keep source formatting. Trust me on this.

Frequently, it is the look and feel of other presentations that I want to reuse, rather than the words on the slide. Many times I’ll reuse a slide simply because I want the theme or the background in it. However, when you choose to reuse slides from a Slide Library, the default setting is to take only the slide content. You may choose a slide for its cool background … only to discover that you inserted only the outdated bullet points instead.

Do not despair, though. You’ll notice when you browse a Slide Library within the Reuse Slides task pane in PowerPoint that you have the option to “Keep source format” at the bottom of the pane. If retaining the slide colors and background are important to you, be sure to check that box.

(Of course, if you have a different background or theme that you’d prefer to use instead, don’t keep the source formatting.)

If you’d like to read more about reusing slides from a Slide Library from within PowerPoint 2007, read Use Slide Libraries to share and reuse PowerPoint 2007 slide content.