Incorporate PowerPoint slides by reference, then generate finished presentations?

January 18, 2007 12:13 PM

How to incorporate PowerPoint slides by reference, then generate finished presentations? I manage a number of distinct PowerPoint presentations with similar (but not identical) content.

The presentations must be kept separate, with some of the slides absoultely not appearing in some presentations in any form. Common slides are scattered throughout the presentations.

I need an elegant way in PowerPoint to incorporate individual or small sets of common slides by reference, so that when I change any of the common slides, the changes appear in all of the presentations when they are opened. I want to then push a “compile” button and generate presentations for distribution which incorporate the actual referenced slides, rather than the references.

The “Insert Slides from Files” and “Insert Object PowerPoint Slide / Presentation” dropdowns won’t do this.

Ideally, I’d be able to do this within PowerPoint, but I’m open to the idea of a utility for this.

Anyone know a way to do this?

posted by ZenMasterThis to computers & internet (19 comments total)

Another way to say this might be I want to put a POINTER to a slide or slide set outside the presentation, then have the pointer(s) become the actual slide(s) when I push a button.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:40 PM on January 18, 2007

You know, I've got the same problem in Keynote. The only way I've figured out to sort of do this is through links. So when you reach the end of a section, you can choose which section you want to jump to next. It's sort of a mini table of contents at the end of each section.

Unfortunately, this requires clicking on the link, rather than just clicking through like a regular slide, which is a little more effort.

There really needs to be a way to do a quick definition at the beginning of a presentation that sets which sections are enabled, and which are disabled. That is something I'd like to see.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen it yet.
posted by jeffxl at 12:53 PM on January 18, 2007

Of course, that requires that everything is in the same presentation.
posted by jeffxl at 12:53 PM on January 18, 2007

jeffxl, you might consider using Armin's Keynote Slide Set scripts. They do exactly what you describe (automatically enabling or disabling various sets of slides within a presentation based on tags). This, of course, doesn't answer ZenMasterThis' problem.

I took a quick look at the AppleScript dictionary for the Mac OS X version of PowerPoint. I haven't tried it, but at a first glance it looks like it might have sufficient AppleScript features that one could write a script that could build a new presentation from individual slides originating in a number of source presentations (although you might have to resort to the script using a rather brute force solution of copying each source presentation, deleting the undesired slides, then creating the final presentation from these diminutive presentations). Unfortunately, I suspect ZenMasterThis is looking for a solution that works on Windows.
posted by RichardP at 1:31 PM on January 18, 2007

Yes, WinXP. :(
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:21 PM on January 18, 2007

Damn. Seems like such a ridiculously obvious capability, as opposed to all the cheese MS loads their products up with.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:22 PM on January 18, 2007

(by obvious I mean obviously useful and productivity-inducing)
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:23 PM on January 18, 2007

PowerPoint 2007 has a new feature called Slide Libraries that may be what you’re looking for. You can “publish” individual slides to a SharePoint library, decorate them with metadata and then assemble them as you wish. The coolest part is a Slide Update feature that lets you keep your slides accurate. Just edit the original slide in the library and all presentations that use that slide can be updated.
posted by clarahamster at 5:20 PM on January 18, 2007

"...Ideally, I’d be able to do this within PowerPoint, but I’m open to the idea of a utility for this.

Anyone know a way to do this?"

The straightforward way of doing this, and gaining considerable flexibility in maintaining, updating, publishing, and easily re-using your content in other ways than presentations, is to abandon PowerPoint in favor of XHTML Web based presentations, based on simple template documents. Many good tips and techniques for doing so in the linked previous thread.

It seems kind of a pain at the outset, but once you have your template document set up, it's not that difficult to do, and once it is done, you can forever after organize all your presentations in a single simple directory structure. Every slide exists only in one place, so that changes to that slide are immediately reflected in all presentations that use that slide. And simply by renaming old XHTML documents when saving new versions, you can maintain a complete version history of the presentations, which is readily available should you need to revert.
posted by paulsc at 5:48 PM on January 18, 2007

clarahanster: Thanks. Getting closer, but MicroSoft's website has the following caveat:

To store, share, and reuse slides in a Slide Library, your computer must be running Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, and it must be connected to a server running Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Bleah. I don't need to share my common slides dynamically with the rest of my department; I just need to be more productive with my own content. I doubt my IT department would support another server-based application just for this.

paulsc: Thanks, but not an option. Unfortunately PowerPoint is a requirement.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:14 PM on January 18, 2007

If you made the whole switch over to LaTeX using something like the beamer class (to make pretty presentations), you could design each set of slides saved into a different file and then use the /input{filename} syntax to include each of the parts for the given presentation. I do this in order to be able to build a CV and a Resume of different formats by including and excluding various sections to build each document.

If this is important to you to be able to do I would say it is worth looking into. It will fundamentally change the way you think about your own content and how parts of it can be reused in different ways. The learning curve for LaTeX is quite steep though, but it will get the job done as you desire.
posted by jduckles at 6:58 PM on January 18, 2007

Problem is that I must distribute presentations to others who will only use PowerPoint :(.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:52 PM on January 18, 2007

Must these people be able to edit your powerpoints or only view them? Would PDF be suitable?
posted by jduckles at 8:34 PM on January 18, 2007

They must be able to edit them.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:49 AM on January 19, 2007

What about using VBA? You could easily write a macro that pulls individual slides from various external files.
posted by jknecht at 10:26 AM on January 19, 2007

Easy for you maybe. I just screwed around with it for an hour and I feel like I learned absolutely nothing. I guess I'll just have to devise a better way to do this manually.

*sigh* The computer is a labor-saving device. The computer is a labor-saving device. The computer...
posted by ZenMasterThis at 12:48 PM on January 19, 2007

ZenMaster,

Here's a macro that replaces the 2nd slide in the current presentation with the 2nd slide from a common presentation

Sub UpdateCommonSlides()
'
' Replaces the 2nd slide
'

ActivePresentation.Slides(2).Delete
ActivePresentation.Slides.InsertFromFile "CommonPresentation.ppt", 1, 2, 2

End Sub

The parameters for the InsertFromFile method are:
1. File name
2. The slide that the inserted slides should go after (in this case, after the first slide)
3. The first slide in the common file to insert
4. The last slide from the common file to insert

Hope this gets you where you need to go.
posted by jknecht at 10:09 PM on January 19, 2007

Hi jknecht: Thanks!!! I'll give it a try this weekend, and I'll look into VBA books when I return to work on Monday. (Your code actually looks very straightforward; I just didn't have any success with the macro recording wizard.)
posted by ZenMasterThis at 2:22 AM on January 20, 2007

It worked; thanks!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:30 AM on January 25, 2007