Two presentation file types in Slidebank

Depending on which 'Abilities' have been set for your account, you may see two different types of PowerPoint file in Slidebank:

Out of these two, the only 'real' PowerPoint files are called 'Master' files, shown with a letter 'P' on an orange icon. These are ordinary PowerPoint files that have been uploaded to your site, or files that have been built within Slidebank and then saved in the 'Master' file format.

When a new slide selection is saved in this way, Slidebank creates a duplicate version of all the selected slides and saves them together as a brand new, stand-alone, PowerPoint presentation file. Any links to the original versions of these slides will no longer exist, and it's as though the file has been uploaded from scratch.

Therefore, Master files NEVER automatically update themselves.

However, 'Virtual' files are like like a 'play list' of slides, similar to the play lists in Spotify or iTunes, but for presentations instead of music. So they are not real presentation files but simply contain a collection of links that point to Master slides in another deck. To make a virtual presentation, simply select the slides you want, save them as a 'Virtual presentation' and they will appear in your Library as a Virtual file, with a letter 'V' on a purple icon.

The important thing is that, because Virtual presentations are just a series of links (not 'real' slides) they always show the exact same content as the original Master slides you copied them from. This means that:

Virtual presentations slides ALWAYS update automatically as the source slides evolve.

Therefore, if a file owner updates the content of a slide in their Master presentation, all Virtual copies of that slide will be automatically updated at the same time.

Optionally, virtual file owners can ask to be notified by email of updates to their files (click 'Information' in the 'File Options' menu), so they can choose different notification settings for different files.

When a virtual presentation has been updated, users see a little clock '+' icon to the top-right of the slide header, which shows how many previous slide versions there are.

Clicking the '+' sign shows previous versions of the slide side by side, so users can see how a slide has evolved over time.

Note: Slidebank Admins may choose to disable access to previous version history.

Suppose your company has a slide showing 'Terms and Conditions' that needs to be included at the end of every sales proposal generated and, over time, your sales team has generated over 200 proposals. Then, 6 months later, the Terms are updated but you don't want to risk people re-using the old Terms. 

If those 200 proposals have been saved in Slidebank as Virtual presentations, simply update a single Terms slide in one location, then each and every virtual proposal can be automatically updated by Slidebank to include the new Terms.

Virtual presentations are therefore an easy way to update perhaps thousands of slide copies all at the same time.

However, not only can Virtual presentations save large amounts of time, but they can also be used to minimise the number of duplicate slides that typically exist throughout many PowerPoint presentations. Instead, just save one single copy of each Master slide and use it again and again in virtual form. That was there is only one single 'source of truth', which can improve the quality and consistency of slides in users' decks.

For these reasons, Admins will often disable their users' ability to save slide selections as Master Files, forcing them to save Virtual files instead. That way, no users' slide selection will be out-of-date.

If you have another examples of how using a Virtual presentations has helped in your organization, please let us know!