PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 15. Collaborating with Others

If you’re part of a large organization or study group, you probably need to work with other folks to nail down the perfect PowerPoint presentation. Maybe you’re responsible for putting together a first crack at the slideshow, but then need to pass it around to your team members to get feedback before you can finish it.

PowerPoint has a variety of features that help folks work together on a presentation. The program lets you place virtual sticky notes on a presentation to communicate with each other. When the time for feedback is over, you can lock out further comments and give it a digital signature to prevent further edits. PowerPoint also lets you work with two pieces of (Microsoft-owned) collaboration software—SharePoint and Groove.

And because giving other folks access to your slideshow in any form raises security issues, this chapter gives you practical advice for keeping your work out of the wrong hands during the review process.

Here are the basic steps involved in collaborating with other folks:

• Get your presentation file ready for the world to see. If you’ve added things to your slides that you don’t want your reviewers to see—private comments, speaker notes, or that cool picture of your kid that you added to a slide for a chuckle and then dragged off-slide when your boss came into the room—you can tell PowerPoint to create a new version of your file with these (and other) potential embarrassments stripped out.

• Pass around your presentation ...