PowerPoint Builder - A different approach

Creating a basis from which your team members can create corporate presentations efficiently and consistently can present challenges.

It needs to be flexible enough for users to be able to create what they need, but too much flexibility can lead to inconsistencies and presentations that are off-brand or out of date.

Most organisations use one of two approaches:

Large corporate slide deck

These could easily contain 50 slides or more, sometimes over 100.
users need to delete all slides not required
tendency for users to re-use their presentations rather than go back to the corporate master deck

PowerPoint slide library content reuse functionality

Slide masters

Can make presentations very large in terms of file size, especially if slide masters contain imagery. Even if only 10 out of 50 of the slide master layouts are being used by slides within a presentation, all 50 slide masters are still contributing to the file size.
Slide masters are really meant to represent layouts, rather than base slides as starting points for editing. Many elements, such as tables, if placed in a slide master would be uneditable in slides created from it. Users then start editing the slide masters themselves, which can lead to other issues, not least consistency.

Up to date content

One of the biggest issues is ensuring that when team members are creating their presentations, they are using the latest, up to date content.

With most users, going back to the large corporate slide deck each time, and re-deleting all the slides they don't want, is unlikely to happen; they are more likely to go back to a previous presentation they've created.

Likewise with slide masters, if they contain corporate information. As the slide masters are contained within each presentation created, over time there will end up being different slide masters, with divergent corporate information, in various presentations across the business.

The different approach

The approach used by PowerPoint Builder, is to encourage users to build up their presentations by selecting and inserting the slides they need, rather than starting with a large corporate deck and cutting out what they don't need.

Presentation creation process

Users start with a very basic presentation (maybe just a front cover and back cover) or they can select a base presentation with a predefined structure.

They then select slides to bring into the presentation. This is done via customised controls on the PowerPoint ribbon. Slides are separated into categories and can be further filtered by other subcategories or keywords, to help users find the content they are looking for easily.

Once chosen, the selected slides are copied into the presentation from a centrally managed, corporate slide library. This ensures that whenever a user uses the PowerPoint Builder mechanism to insert a slide, it's always the latest version.

Auto-population of content

Users can be prompted for information about a presentation, which can then be automatically populated throughout. This might include elements such as presentation title, section titles or confidentiality statements.

Automatic Table of Contents / Indexes

It is also possible to automatically update a table of contents or index slide within a presentation, picking up information from slide titles and/or divider pages and populating corresponding slide numbers.

PowerPoint Builder is a tailored solution

PowerPoint Builder is a bespoke product, tailored to the requirements of individual clients. As such, the cost of implementation will vary from one client to another.

Once implemented, PowerPoint Builder functionality is available to all users of the templates, indefinitely. There is no ongoing licensing cost.

Enhanced PowerPoint functionality

Typically, PowerPoint Builder functionality would be implemented alongside our enhanced PowerPoint functionality, which gives users easy access to the styles they should be using within their presentations, the corporate colour palette and productivity tools, such as automatic table reformatting.