| 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 softwareSharePoint 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 seeprivate 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 roomyou can tell PowerPoint to create a new version of your file with these (and other) potential embarrassments stripped out. -
Pass around your presentation file. The easiest way to distribute your slideshow is to email it to everyone who needs to see it, but you can also upload it to a network or Web server, or burn it onto a CD or DVD and hand-deliver it. If your computer happens to be attached to a Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 server (see page 439), which is designed to let folks share and manage multiple copies of the same document, you can upload your presentation to something called a document workspace and use SharePoint's options to track your reviewers' feedback. -
Your colleagues review your presentation and send it back to you. Using PowerPoint, your reviewers can add the digital equivalent of sticky notes to each slide. They can change or add slide content, too; but unlike earlier versions of PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007 doesn't track individual changes. For that, you need SharePoint. (See the box below.) -
Review the feedback you received from your colleagues, decide which comments and changes to keep, and finalize the presentation. Finalizing a presentation means marking it as finished and making the file read-only, which keeps folks from accidentally wasting their time reviewing it (since you've already decided not to incorporate any more comments). Optionally, add a digital signature. NOSTALGIA CORNER
No More Change Tracking | | You won't find the Revisions toolbar or task pane in PowerPoint 2007. Microsoft pulled the ability to track revisions from PowerPoint 2007, perhaps because they're pushing for everyone who uses Office to use SharePoint, too, which does let you track revisions. Regardless of the reason, unless your computer's hooked up to a computer running SharePoint, you can't view and accept the individual changes your reviewers make to your slideshow. Instead, you need to rely on the comments your reviewers include (page 434) and your own eyeballs to determine which content on which slides, if any, your reviewers modified. As you can imagine, merging the changes your reviewers make to your slides is quite a bit of work. For example, suppose you email a slideshow to three different reviewers, all of whom change the same slidein different ways. Because PowerPoint 2007 doesn't help you with change tracking or merging, unless you're using SharePoint you are the one who has to look at all four versions of slide number two (your original, plus your three reviewers') and figure out for yourself how you want to integrate everyone's changes. To simplify the process, consider emailing your reviewers a finalized, encrypted, or digitally signed copy of your presentation to discourage them from making changes directly to your presentation. That way, you can print out their comments and make any changes that need to be made to the one master copy of your presentation. |
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