Chapter 22: Preparing a Presentation for Mass Distribution

When preparing a presentation that you will send out into the world, whether through e-mail, on CD, or on the Web, you never know what will happen to it or how people will end up viewing or even changing it. This can be a little unnerving!

In this chapter, you will learn how to protect your privacy by removing personal information from a PowerPoint file. You will also learn how to decide on a file format for distribution and how to ensure that the presentation contains nothing that will be incompatible with an earlier version of PowerPoint. You will also learn how to distribute a presentation on CD, and how to publish one in HTML format on the Web.

Working with File Properties

The properties of a file include fixed attributes such as its creation date and size, as well as properties that you can edit, such as the author name, keywords, subject, and comments. Some of these variable properties are also referred to as metadata - literally, "data about data."

PowerPoint automatically saves some properties for you, such as the author name, and provides opportunities for you to save additional properties. Properties can be helpful when you are searching for a certain file or maintaining a presentation library, as discussed in Chapter 23. However, when you are distributing a presentation widely, you might prefer to remove some or all of its properties to preserve your privacy.

Changing a File's Properties

To add or change a file's properties, choose Office Prepare Properties to display a Document Properties window along the top of the presentation window. You can then add, delete, or change the properties, as shown in Figure 22.1. To close the Document Properties window, click the X in its upper-right corner.

Figure 22.1: Use the Document Properties window that appears at the top of the presentation window to assign or change document metadata.

The properties that you can find in the Document Properties window include:

• Author: Filled in automatically from the username that you specified when you installed Office.

• Title: Used mostly when creating a Web page. The title text appears in the title bar of the Web browser when the page displays. By default, the title is the first line of the document.

• Subject, Keywords, Category, and Status: By default, these fields are empty, but you can specify your own information and settings.

Note 

The author's name is automatically added to each file that you create in PowerPoint, based on the username that you specified when you installed Office. To change this name, choose Office PowerPoint Options, click Popular, and then change the entry in the User Name text box.

You can also display a Properties dialog box for the file, in which you can set advanced properties. To do this, click the down arrow next to Document Properties in the Document Properties window, as shown in Figure 22.1. Then, from the menu that appears, click Advanced Properties.

The Document Properties dialog box is the same dialog box that you would see if you right-clicked the file and then clicked Properties from outside of PowerPoint (that is, from Windows Explorer or any file management window). This dialog box contains the following tabs:

• General: Uneditable data about the file, such as its type, location, size, and operating system attributes - for example, read-only and hidden.

• Summary: A continuation of the Document Properties window, with additional properties that you can specify or change, as shown in Figure 22.2.

  
  Figure 22.2: The Summary tab of the Properties dialog box contains additional property fields.

• Statistics: Another page of uneditable data, this one relating to statistical analysis of the presentation, such as number of slides, number of words, number of revisions, and total editing time.

• Contents: Still more uneditable data. This data includes the fonts that are used, the theme, and the titles of the slides.

• Custom: A tab where you can set some of the less-common properties for the file.

You can define custom properties in the Custom tab. Custom properties are special-purpose fields that you can add when you need them. To set a custom property, follow these steps:

1. In the Custom tab, click the property from the Name list that you want to use.

2. Open the Type drop-down list and select the type of data that it should hold. The default is Text, which accepts any input.

3. In the Value field, type the desired value for this property.

4. Click Add to add the property, type, and value to the Properties list, as shown in Figure 22.3.

   
   Figure 22.3: You can set a custom property in the Custom tab.

5. Repeat steps 1 to 4 to add more custom properties, if needed; then click OK.

Removing Personal Information from a File

Before you distribute a PowerPoint file, you might want to remove some of the properties from it that contain sensitive information. For example, if you have entered confidential information about a client in the Comments property, then you may not want the client or others to see it.

If you can remember all of the properties that you set for the file, then you can go back in and remove them manually, as you learned in the preceding section. However, it is much easier to use the new Document Inspector feature in PowerPoint 2007 to remove personal information from the file. Follow these steps:

1. Choose Office Prepare Inspect Document. The Document Inspector dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 22.4.

   
   Figure 22.4: You can inspect the presentation for information that you might want to remove.

2. Select or deselect the check boxes for the various types of information that you want to look for. The personal information contained in properties falls under the Document Properties and Personal Information category.

3. Click Inspect.

4. Review the inspection results. Categories in which items have been found display their findings; categories in which no items have been found appear with check marks, as shown in Figure 22.5.

   
   Figure 22.5: You can view the inspection results.

5. For each category that you want to clear, click Remove All.

6. When you are finished, click Reinspect to check the document again, or click Close to end the process.

Caution 

Be careful that you don't remove hidden object you want to keep, or strip all the speaker notes out of a presentation unintentionally. One way to ensure that you don't do this is to perform the inspection on a copy of the presentation, not the original.