Part 3 of 4 in our One deck for every audience series. One source deck holds slides for every audience, internal ones included. This part is about making sure the internal ones stay inside.
The slide that should never have left
Most teams have a story about it: the slide with internal margins in a customer's PDF, the draft price list forwarded to a partner, the presenter's working slide that nobody remembered to delete.
A folder of copied decks hides that risk, because the internal slides sit in files of their own. Keep one source deck for every audience, as Parts 1 and 2 of this series suggest, and internal and external slides share a file. That is a strength - one place to keep current - but only if something stands at the door and decides what may leave.
Checking by eye does not hold up for long. A long export is easy to skim and hard to read, and the slide that matters is the one you skim past.
In Genie, the door is two labels on every slide.
Two labels on every slide
Stage says how finished a slide is:
- draft - still being written
- review - ready for a colleague to check
- publish - approved to go out
Sensitivity says who may see it:
- internal - your own organisation only
- customer - your customers
- partner - your partners
- public - anyone
The two answer different questions, so keep them apart: a finished slide can still be internal, and a slide meant for the public can still be a draft.
You set both at once: select one slide or many and give them a stage and a sensitivity in one step. Genie stores the labels in the deck file as tags, invisible on the slide, and they travel with a slide when it is copied into another deck.
The check at the PDF export
Before Genie writes a PDF - of one collection or of the whole deck - it reads each slide's stage and sensitivity against the deck's rules. If the rules forbid what a slide carries, the export stops and no file is written. The deck itself carries a stage and a sensitivity too, set in Genie's settings, and the same rules apply to it: until you first set them, a deck is draft and internal, so nothing leaves it by accident.
Under Genie's default rules, two labels are enough to stop it:
- An internal slide never becomes a PDF.
- A draft slide never becomes a PDF.
So a collection built for your own team can be presented from PowerPoint as often as you like, but it cannot be turned into a file that gets forwarded. And a slide that is still being written cannot slip into a customer's PDF because someone exported in a hurry.
The check works on each slide's own labels, not on the collection's name. A slide marked internal stays internal whichever collection it sits in, so an internal slide added to a customer collection by mistake stops that collection's PDF rather than leaving inside it.
Why the check sits on the PDF
A PDF is the file that travels. It is attached to emails, uploaded to portals and forwarded by people you have never met. A deck presented in the room stays with the presenter. Putting the check on the PDF export puts it where the risk is, without getting in the way of anyone presenting their own slides.
It also means the rule is set once, not remembered each time. Nobody exporting a PDF has to know which slides were meant for whom: the slides say so themselves.
We work this way ourselves. Our own internal briefing deck is marked internal for exactly this reason: it is presented from PowerPoint, never handed out as a PDF.
A routine your team can follow
- Write in draft. Mark new slides draft while you work on them, so a half-finished slide cannot reach a PDF.
- Move to review when a slide is ready for a colleague to check.
- Move to publish only when the slide is approved: a deliberate step, taken by the person who approves.
- Set the sensitivity by audience. Internal for your own team, customer or partner for those audiences, public for anything you would put on your website.
- Export, and let the check do its job. An export that stops has told you something worth knowing before the file left the building.
The labels also make a deck easier to read for the next person. A colleague who opens the source file can see which slides are finished and which are meant for whom, without asking. And none of it needs a separate system: the labels and the rules live in the same file as the slides, so the deck carries them wherever it is opened with Genie.
Control what leaves, without slowing down
One source deck for every audience saves time only if it is safe to share from. A stage and a sensitivity on every slide, checked before every PDF, make it safe: internal and draft slides stay in the room, and everything else goes out under the deck's rules. Genie is on the Genie page, free to use, with advanced features under a licence. If you would like to talk through how your team controls what leaves the building, get in touch.
About CATIM. CATIM - Creating Automation Technology In Motion - empowers people to engineer automation solutions that solve hard technical problems. Genie, CATIM's PowerPoint add-in, is free to use, with advanced features under licence: catim.co/genie.