PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Slideshows for Multiple Audiences

If you give a lot of presentations, you've probably found yourself creating one big comprehensive presentation on a particular topic, and then adjusting it for different audiences. For example, say you want to give slightly different variations of the same sales pitch to small-business owners, government acquisitions teams, and purchasing departments in large corporations. Say, too, that you want a ten-minute version of your presentation that skims the highlights for those times when all your potential clients will give you is ten minutes of their time. But you also want thirty-minute and hour-long versions that cover the technical features of your product.

You could reinvent the wheel by copying slides from one slideshow into another, reorganizing them, and saving the newly copied slides as a separate slideshow. But PowerPoint gives you an easier way to accomplish the same result. By creating a custom slideshow, you tell PowerPoint which subset of slides in your comprehensive presentation you want to designate as a new version. You even get to change the order the slides appear. Then you give your new version a meaningful name, like small_business or ten_minute, to remind you what situations to use it for.

Because you don't actually duplicate slides or files when you create a custom slideshow, you don't have to worry about carting around multiple PowerPoint files (or keeping them all updated and in synch).

Note

Unfortunately, you can't mix-and-match ...