When a company asks you to create a presentation for two different timed sessions you create two powerpoint presentations right? Wrong… when you have different timeslots for presentations but the content is the same you can use the custom slideshow option in PowerPoint.

Two for One
I find myself often presenting for one hour or an hour and a half. But in some cases i can use the same presentation with other sessions which lasts even longer. So how do you go about that without creating a presentation for every possible timeslot?

Migrating to Microsoft Office 2010
Currently a lot of companies are still migrating to Office 2010. Some of them want just a quick tour of the possibilities of 2010 and others want a deep dive in what’s new in every single application. I decided to create one presentation which covers the full story. So i talk about the birth of the ribbon, show the newly added functionality per application such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word. Now when a company just wants a brief introduction of Office 2010 i do a quick analysis of what that company thinks is important to their employees. I create a custom slide show in which i have added the slides that fit the audience best and use that for that specific presentation. Does the company want the full content then i choose the complete presentation.

Show me how it is done
Ok for this example i will use an exsisting presentation. It’s about SharePoint 2010 and for example purposes i will only add some slides to the custom show. You will get the idea.

1. Open your presentation

2. In the ribbon, in the Start Slide Show Group, click the Custom Slide Show button

3. Click the Custom shows… option. You know another dialog will pop up right? How can you tell?

4. In the next dialog click the New button

5. a new dialog will pop up. In the Slide show name textbox enter your description for you presentation. In this example i named it Short_Version

6. Now in the left listbox click the slide you want to add to the custom show by clicking the Add button in the center of the dialog. Repeat this for all the slides you need for the short presentation. When done click OK

7. You now have a dialog which shows you custom show title. Click on the show button to see if it fits your needs.

8. Click close when done

9. Now when presenting choose the appropriate custom show or choose the complete presentation whatever fits best.

Pretty neat right? Make one supersized presentation and depending on the clients needs pick the slides you need and save them in a custom show. I know what you are thinking… You can hide the slides you don’t need right? That would be an option to choose but in the end you would have to modify it again for your next session right? For this scenario the custom show would be the way to go!

And make sure your audience stays awake 🙂