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My company produces about a dozen rather long quarterly reports in
PowerPoint. Yes, you read that right. PowerPoint. And when I say long, I
mean long: 200-600 slides per report, and each report usually gets issued as
a couple of partial releases before the final data is complete.
We haven't been able to train the customer base to use PowerPoint's features
to improve their navigation (using cntrl-f to search or looking at the
reports in the thumbnail or the outline view to browse). And if you have to
train customers in how to use your reports, there's something wrong!
The reports used to be PDFed Word docs, so customers are comfortable with a
bookmarked Table of Contents with Lists of Figures and Tables. My success
with finding ways to navigate within a PPT document like that has not been
particularly strong so far:
* I've tried typing up a Table of Contents into a slide (as it is fairly
static from one quarter to the next) and hyperlinking those entries to
slides, but the links only work when people are looking at the report in
presentation mode, which doesn't happen; they typically just open the report
as a PPT file.
* We've inserted solid color pages between sections to make the thumbnail
view more useful, but you can only see a small percentage of the slides at a
time, so that hasn't helped much for the longer reports. And then there's
the problem of getting the users into thumbnails view in the first place....
Some of the analysts (who are both contributors and salespeople) have now
decided that I should manually number slides with chapter#-page# (i.e.,
...8-12, 8-13, 9-1, 9-2,...) at the bottom of each slide. The prospect of
pasting text boxes on the bottom of each and every one of the thousands of
slides we produce fills me with dread--for the initial effort, for the
updating effort as we get add'l data, and for the possibility of error it
introduces.
Any ideas out there? Abandoning PPT isn't one of the possibilities. Sending
the files out in another format isn't a possibility.
------------
Glenda S. McKinney
Editorial Manager, DisplaySearch
1301 South Capital of Texas Highway ? B-125 ? Austin TX 78746
glenda -at- displaysearch -dot- com ? 512/459-3126 x101
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