Advanced PowerPoint 2007

Page 2 of 2

by Wayne Kao and Jeff Huang - published on this site on April 11th 2008

...continued from Page 1

Reusing Slides with Slide Library
Tell Me When This Slide Changes

Reusing Slides with Slide Library

Adding to your Library

Two methods can be used to add slides to your library: Use PowerPoint to upload slides to the SharePoint site, and use the SharePoint site to grab slides from a PowerPoint presentation.

Publishing From PowerPoint

First, PowerPoint has the capability to publish slides to a SharePoint server, assuming that you know the URL of the site.To do this, first open the presentation that contains the slides you want to upload and make sure that the presentation is saved (otherwise, PowerPoint notifies you that you need to do so).Then click the Office button, select the arrow next to Publish, and then select Publish Slides (see Figure 9.7).

Figure 9.7: The Publish Slides option from the Office button allows you to upload Slides from your presentation to a SharePoint site.

Now you will notice a dialog that looks like the one shown in Figure 9.8 that presents you with all the slides in this presentation. Click the check boxes next to slides to select them or use the Select All button. If you click on the File Name or Description fields, you can edit them; that information will be published along with the slide. Select Show Only Selected Slides if you have many slides and do not care about the ones you are not going to publish.This will give you a better idea of what content is going to end up on your site.

Figure 9.8: The dialog to Publish Slides lets you customize pieces of the slide that will end up on the SharePoint site. Click on the fields under File Name and Description in order to modify that information for a specific slide.

Make sure that only the slides you want to upload are checked and then select Publish. Notice that the dialog has gone away.You might be puzzled at first if you already have your SharePoint site open in a web browser because the site does not automatically refresh and it might look like nothing has happened. Press F5 to refresh your browser to see the changes.

Adding Slides From Sharepoint

Now we will show you how to grab slides from the SharePoint site and add them to the library. From the SharePoint site, select Upload and click on Publish Slides (see Figure 9.9).

Figure 9.9: Click the Upload button on the SharePoint site to insert new slides into the library

If it isn’t already open, PowerPoint launches and brings up the Open File dialog. Find a presentation you want to use slides from and select it.You are presented with the same dialog as shown back in Figure 9.7 that shows all the slides in the presentation and lets you customize them before uploading them to the site.

Now continue the previous steps to complete the uploading process, and refresh your SharePoint site to see the new slides in action. (Refresh the browser using F5 or the Refresh button.)

Using The Slide Library

Now that you have a populated library of excellent slides you want to reuse,we can show you how to take advantage of this great resource and save yourself and your team some time. From the main Slide Library page, you will notice that the list of slides has corresponding check boxes next to them. Select the ones you want to include in a presentation, and then click Copy Slide to Presentation (see Figure 9.10).

Figure 9.10: Choose slides to copy.

PowerPoint will launch if it hasn’t already, and the Copy Slides to PowerPoint dialog appears. From this dialog, you can select the destination for the slides—either an open presentation or a new presentation— and also a couple of options.

The first option has to do with the design theme that the slides have after they are incorporated into the new presentation; check the Keep the Source Presentation Format box if you want the slides to look as they did when they were created, or leave it unchecked to match the slide’s content with the rest of the slides in the presentation.

The next check box,Tell Me When This Slide Changes, is sort of like data binding, or, in other words, the slide on the server will notify this presentation that it has changed if somebody makes modifications to it.That way, you can ensure that you always have the latest copy of this slide and are notified to update it when it changes on the SharePoint server.

Back

Tell Me When This Slide Changes

If this check box is selected when importing a slide from a slide library, you will notice an icon on the thumbnail of this slide in the Thumbnail pane (see Figure 9.11).

Figure 9.11: The thumbnail of slides that can be synchronized with the SharePoint site contains a small icon that looks like two arrows in sync.

Click on this icon and look at the four options:

• Check This Slide for Changes
• Check All Slides for Changes
• Stop Checking This Slide for Changes
• Stop Checking All Slides for Changes

When the Check This Slide for Changes option is selected, you are presented with the Confirm Slide Update dialog shown in Figure 9.12.

Figure 9.12: Synchronizing a slide means comparing the version on the SharePoint site with the one you have in your presentation and deciding whether you want to replace or append the version on the site with the one in your presentation.

This shows you a preview of the two slides and lets you decide whether you want to replace the slide in your presentation with the one on the SharePoint site or whether you want to just append the modified slide into your presentation and use it that way.

If the two slides are exactly the same, a dialog tells you that there are no updates at this time.