Creating a SharePoint Slide Library

Often people who work at the same company can benefit from sharing slides with one another. For example, a product manager might have slides that describe his product, and a sales or marketing person in the company could save a great deal of time by copying such slides instead of recreating them from scratch. However, it can be time-consuming to wade through large presentations to find a single slide that could be of benefit.

A slide library is a specialized type of document library that stores individual slides rather than entire presentations. A slide library enables users to publish individual slides that they think might be of interest to others in their organization. For example, with a slide library, product managers could post two or three slides about their products, and an executive or salesperson could easily browse these and choose the ones needed for a presentation to a particular client.

Caution 

If a slide contains links to other content, such as videos or sounds, that linked content is not included in the slide library.

Just as with a document library, you can check out slides from a slide library and attach an approval process and tasks to them. In addition, you can tag each slide in several ways, and search the slide libraries for just the slides you need.

Caution 

Slide libraries are possible only if the SharePoint server has Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) extensions installed and enabled. Not all SharePoint sites have this. If you are not able to access slide libraries, check with your SharePoint administrator.

You might need to activate the Slide Library feature on your SharePoint site before you can use slide libraries. To do so, follow these steps:

1. In your browser, navigate to your SharePoint site.

2. Click the Site Actions button on the upper right of your home page. From the menu that appears, select Site Settings.

3. In the Site Administration column, click Site Features.

4. On the list of site features, click the Activate button for the slide libraries.

Creating a Slide Library

Before you can create a slide library, your SharePoint administrator must give you permission to create slide libraries on your particular site. Once you have access to build a slide library on your SharePoint site, you can add the slide library you want. You must build the slide library from the Web-based interface to your SharePoint site, not directly from within PowerPoint.

Follow these steps to create a slide library:

1. In your browser, navigate to your SharePoint site.

2. Click the Site Actions button and click Create. If you don't have a Create option, you don't have access to create a slide library. Contact your SharePoint administrator and have them give you the access.

3. In the first column of site options, click Slide Library to create a new slide library. The New dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 23.13.

   
   Figure 23.13: Create a slide library.

4. Fill in your library name and description.

5. Change the slide version history from No to Yes.

   Note 

   Creating a versioned library allows you to track when slides are changed, who changed them, and what was changed. In addition, it allows you to keep the old versions of the slides in your library in case you need to refer to them again. It takes more disk space on the server, but it can save you some hassles later when you need to look at the old version of a slide.

6. Click Create.

When you return to the home page of your site, you see your new slide library in the left column of the home page. To access it, click the library name. You can also access the library by clicking the View All Site Content link at the top of that list. Once you view the site content, the slide library shows under Document Libraries.

Now that you have a slide library, it is time to put slides into it. You can add slides from either PowerPoint or the Web interface.

Placing Slides in a Slide Library from PowerPoint

If the presentation is already open in PowerPoint, it's a natural next step to publish slides directly from within PowerPoint to the slide library. To store slides in a Slide Library from within PowerPoint, follow these steps:

1. Open your presentation and choose Office Publish Publish Slides. The Publish Slides dialog box opens as shown in Figure 23.14.

   
   Figure 23.14: Publish slides to a slide library from within PowerPoint.

2. Mark the check box for each slide that you want to publish, or click the Select All button to add all of the slides to the library.

   Can't see all of the slides? Use the scroll bar on the right to move down through the slides.

3. (Optional) Change the filename and/or description for a slide if desired.

4. Type the path to your slide library in the Publish To field. The easiest way to get the path to your slide library is to go to it in your browser. Select the beginning of the path. (Don't select from the /Forms part on.)

5. Click the Publish button to publish the slides to the library. (You may be prompted for a username and password for the server.)

   As the slides are prepared for the library, you see status updates in the green status bar, found at the bottom of your presentation, which grows as each slide publishes. When PowerPoint finishes publishing the slides, it returns you to the regular interface.

6. To see the published slides, return to the browser window and refresh the display (press the F5 key). See Figure 23.15.

Figure 23.15: The list of published slides in the library.

Placing Slides in a Slide Library from the SharePoint Web Interface

You can place slides in a slide library directly from the SharePoint site if you prefer. This method opens PowerPoint, so you must have PowerPoint installed on the PC to do this.

To publish slides starting from the Web interface, follow these steps:

1. View your slide library in a browser window.

2. From the Upload drop-down list, select Publish Slides. Your view switches to PowerPoint. If it wasn't opened, it will open, and a Browse dialog box appears.

3. Browse to the presentation you want to add to your slide library, select it and click Open.

From here, the process is the same as it was in PowerPoint. Select the slides, make any changes to the files or the descriptions, and then click publish. When PowerPoint finishes publishing, it remains open but no presentations are shown.

Once you have published slides to a library, the library shows up in the drop-down list of available libraries on the Publish Slides dialog box. The most recently used library will show in the Publish To field.