The Sanity Saving PowerPoint Secret You Should Know!

Around here, it is pretty common to have a lot of cooks in our slide deck kitchen. In most places, it is a rare deck that results from a totally solo effort. Even if you only share slides occasionally, you can still benefit from a little time and sanity-saving knowledge.

At a minimum, most people have their slides reviewed by someone else. Far too often that is a painful process that involves emailing copies around and then going crazy trying to keep track of everything. Who said what and when? What stays in? What gets thrown out? That way is time-consuming and painful.

Fortunately, there is a simple, MUCH better way. Let me explain.

The only prerequisite for this to work is a free Onedrive account from Microsoft.

1. Open the PowerPoint deck you want to share and click Share in the top-right corner of the window.
   
2. Next, enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the presentation with. You can use the drop-down list to set the type of access you want them to have. (View-only or Edit)
   
3. If you haven’t already saved your deck to OneDrive, you’ll get a prompt to do that.

Now you only have one copy of your slides that everyone can access. When everyone is able to work simultaneously on the same file, you can save you hours and hours of drudgery. Instead of wasting time trying to merge a bunch of content or playing detective to figure out which conflicting change to apply, you can go home early and enjoy the rest of your day!

TIP: Instead of getting lost in an endless sea of emails, you will save even more time by using PowerPoint’s comments feature.

The people you’re working don’t even need PowerPoint. They can use PowerPoint online (part of One Drive) right in their web browser. Just share the link and you’re off to the races!!!

Try this link and check it out for yourself. Please add a slide and/or insert a comment so I know you were there!)

That’s it for now. You can pop on over to Microsoft to learn more.

Do you wrestle with this same challenge? How do you handle it? Do you have another solution that works well for you?