Discover lost treasure in a PowerPoint library

Imagine spending an afternoon building the perfect slide deck: looking for the right images to tell your story, finding just the right words, formatting things so they communicate without distracting. Then not being able to find and use those slides again… that is not my idea of fun or being productive.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/people/bluefootedbooby used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license

There has to be a better way than remembering “I made a slide like that…where did I put it?”  Previously I proposed using search as a powerful time-saving alternative to maintaining complicated organizational schemes.   Today’s idea extends that benefit: not only does a searchable PowerPoint library save you time, it also keeps track of your important work.

Many people I know spend a lot of time building PowerPoint presentations.  Whether for marketing, sales, training, or research talks, we spend valuable time developing ideas, researching information, generating data, and considering the best way to present our thoughts.  But what happens to the product of all that work?  Are we able to take advantage of it for future presentations?  For many of us much of this work is lost among all the PowerPoint slides we develop for any number of presentations.  Among those slides are our most valuable assets, things in which we invested substantial intellectual capital.

Maybe you keep track of your best slides by putting PowerPoint files in folders that are logical locations, or maybe you keep a PowerPoint file containing your favorite slides – your greatest hits.  But what if that logical location doesn’t make sense six months later? Or a slide that didn’t rate “greatest hit” status actually is critical?  Wouldn’t it be great if someone or something kept track of all your slides and was able to pull them together as you needed them?

You can address these problems, or at least make them less painful by maintaining a slide library.  That sounds like a lot of work, but there are tools that do most of the work for you.  For example, the Slideboxx PowerPoint library software (developed by the publisher of this blog) automatically makes your slides searchable and findable.  So your former B-side can become a greatest hit and you’ll find it when you need it.  That way you can focus your energy on creating new greatest hits rather than remaking the oldies but goodies!  That’s what I call discovering lost treasure in your PowerPoint library.