Setting File Properties

File properties are facts about each file that can help you organize them. If you have a lot of PowerPoint files, using file properties can help you search intelligently for them using the Search feature you learned about in the preceding section. For example, you can specify an author, a manager, and a company for each file, and then search based on those values.

You can set a file's properties while it is open in PowerPoint by doing the following:

1. Choose Office Prepare Properties. A Properties ribbon appears above the presentation window.

2. Fill in any information you want to store about the presentation. See Figure 3.16.

   
   Figure 3.16: Enter information to store in the file's properties.

3. Click the down arrow to the right of Standard in the Properties ribbon, and choose Advanced Properties. The Properties dialog box for the file appears.

4. Click the Summary tab, and confirm/change any information there. This is the same information that you entered in the Properties ribbon, with the addition of a couple of other fields. See Figure 3.17.

   
   Figure 3.17: The Summary tab has many of the same fields as the ribbon.

5. Click the Custom tab, shown in Figure 3.18, and choose any additional fields you need and set values for them. For example, click the Client field on the Name list, and type a value for it in the Value text box. Repeat this for any of the other custom fields.

   
   Figure 3.18: The Custom tab enables you to set custom properties based on your tracking needs.

6. Review the information on the Statistics and Contents tab if desired. (You can't change that information.)

7. Click OK.

Working with Multiple Presentations

You will usually work with only one presentation at a time. But occasionally you may need to have two or more presentations open at once-for example, to make it easier to copy text or slides from one to the other.

To open another presentation, choose Office Open and select the one you want, the same as usual.

When more than one presentation is open, you can switch among them by selecting the one you want to see from the taskbar in Windows. Alternatively, you can click the Switch Windows button on the View tab and select any open presentation from there as shown in the following figure.

Switch between open windows of all applications-not just PowerPoint-by pressing Alt+Esc repeatedly to cycle through them, or by holding down the Alt key and pressing Tab to browse thumbnails of open windows.

Now you can use the contents of the properties fields when performing a search.