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For those of you who have marcomm responsibilities, how do you keep a
handle on version control for PowerPoint slides? It seems every
salesperson has grabbed draft versions of various company slides and
continues to use them no matter how many times the draft has been
corrected or improved. I find myself making the same corrections time
after time, regardless of my pleas that they should discard the older
versions. Given that PowerPoint has no "track changes" functionality,
and all the plug-ins I can find are for adding special effects rather
than managing slides, what's the solution?
When we implement a doc management system, we can either treat every new
version of a presentation as a document or we can treat each individual
slide as a document. The advantage of the latter approach is that it is
much more compact; you only have to look in one repository to find the
slide you need, rather than sifting through multiple presentations. The
disadvantage is that all those separate one-slide files need to be
combined into a presentation. Once a salesperson has been through that
exercise a couple of times, we'll be back to the situation with
unauthorized junk stored on their desktops and no way to force old
slides to self-destruct at the end of the tape, Jim.
So, as I said, how do you handle this challenge at your company? Is
there a doc management system that has a particularly graceful approach?
Do you have a clever strategy for convincing sales and marketing types
to follow a standard procedure? Something else that works?
Dick
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