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Dick Margulis wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> For those of you who have marcomm responsibilities, how do you keep a
> handle on version control for PowerPoint slides?
Dick,
I work in a very small company, and I handle both tech comm and marcom.
We have up to four people doing presentations and creating documents for
customers. Right now I really only have control over basic formats and
not boilerplate content (that's next on my list), but I'll share the
theory.
We use Visual SourceSafe and Windows NT (desktops are W2000). On one of
the network servers, there is a directory called \\users\templates,
where I store all templates (Word, Excel, PPT, etc.). In MS Word, I have
everyone point their Workgroup templates to the network directory. The
entire MS Office suite uses this directory, so when you select
File-->New in any app it goes there and finds the template files.
Because all the templates are checked into SourceSafe, they are read
only. When I make updates, I check them out of VSS, make the changes,
and check them back in.
Whenever someone comes to me and says, "how do I create one of those
online presentations," I gently remind them to select File-->New from
the menu and they will get all the available templates. I have to remind
them a lot, but they're getting the hang of things. I don't have perfect
control over the templates yet, but I'm working on it. Recently I
updates some technical architecture drawings that are used frequently in
our presentations. I sent the WMF files to everyone and asked them to
please use these new ones in their presentations. Constant, gentle
reminders seem to help.
I think one of the big challenges is getting them to always go to the
new template. They may copy in content from their more recent docs, but
at least the templates are solid. (BTW, in PowerPoint, if you copy
slides from one presentation and paste them into another, the format of
the one you pasted INTO is the format that holds.) Then you can work on
getting them to send their content through a central source. One step at
a time.
But I only have four people to keep track of. Hope this helps.
Lisa Wright
Technical Writer
PeakEffects, Inc.
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