Part 1 of 4 in our One deck for every audience series. Every presenter knows the folder: the final deck, the final deck for one customer, the short version, the short version v2. This series is about replacing that folder with one file.
Why copied decks drift
A deck rarely stays with one audience. Sales wants a short version for a first meeting. Engineering wants the full technical story. A customer asks for something they can forward to their manager. The quickest answer is to copy the file, delete a few slides, change a few others and save it under a new name.
It works once. Then a price changes, a diagram is corrected or a product is renamed, and the fix lands in one copy only. A few months on, nobody can say which version is current, and a customer is reading a slide the team corrected long ago.
The trouble is not the people. It is the copies. Every copy is one more place where the same slide has to be kept up to date, and nobody keeps ten places up to date for long.
Copies also hide good work. A slide one salesperson sharpened for a customer never reaches the rest of the team, because it lives in a file only that salesperson opens.
One source file, many audiences
Genie is CATIM's PowerPoint add-in, built for exactly this problem. Instead of a copy for each audience, you keep one source deck and give each audience a collection.
A collection is a named set of slides inside that one file: a short introduction for prospects, the full technical deck, a training set for service staff. You select slides and add them to a collection. A slide can belong to as many collections as you like, so the slide that explains your product's architecture can sit in the technical deck, the training set and the sales introduction at once, while it exists only once.
Genie keeps the membership in the deck file itself, as tags that are invisible on the slide. Nothing lives in a separate database or on a server: send the source file to a colleague and the collections go with it. Genie also works on the decks you already have. Open an existing deck and add its slides to collections.
Each collection becomes a show, a deck or a PDF
A collection is only useful if you can do something with it. From any collection, Genie produces:
- A slide show. Preview the collection as a show before a meeting, or keep it as a named show and present it straight from the source file.
- A deck of its own. Copy the collection's slides into a new presentation when someone needs an editable PowerPoint.
- A PDF. Export the collection as a PDF named after it, ready to send or publish.
Every output is made from the source deck at the moment you ask for it, so it carries whatever the source holds that day. There is no "latest version" to hunt for in a folder: the latest version is the source.
Edit once, every audience gets it
This is where the time comes back. When a slide changes, you change it once, in the source. The next time any collection that holds it is shown or exported, the change is there.
Think of the slides that change most often: pricing, the product line-up, the team, the latest results. In a folder of copies, each of those is a hunt-and-fix job across every file. In one Genie deck, each is one edit.
It changes how a team shares a deck, too. Marketing can look after the brand and the core story, engineering the technical slides, and sales the collections they present, all in the same file. Nobody fixes someone else's copy, because there are no copies to fix. Review gets simpler as well: a manager signing off the material reads one file, not one for each audience.
Getting started
Genie runs in desktop PowerPoint on Windows. The release is signed by CATIM Pty Ltd, so PowerPoint shows who published the add-in and that its code is unchanged. It is free to use, with advanced features available under a licence from CATIM.
The workflow is short:
- Build your slides as you always have, in one deck.
- Select the slides an audience needs and add them to a collection named for that audience.
- Check which collections a slide belongs to, or list every collection in the deck.
- Produce a show, a deck or a PDF for each collection.
The download and Genie's readme are on the Genie page. Part 2 of this series shows how to structure the source deck so that every collection still reads as one story.
One file to keep current
If your team keeps many versions of one deck, try Genie on the deck that causes the most trouble. Start with two collections, a short one and a full one, and see how quickly the copies stop being needed. If you would like to talk through how your team presents, sells or trains with PowerPoint, 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.