Copying slides from another presentation is a practice that likely began with the second presentation ever built. Reusing content when developing sales pitches, financial updates, or other PowerPoint presentations leverages existing thinking, ensures consistency, and drives productivity.
To support this practice, Microsoft released the Reuse Slides search feature with its best version only available with Office 365 for enterprises/Office ProPlus.
However, this feature is a file search tool that works from within PowerPoint and not a true slide search solution. As such, Reuse Slides is not helpful for locating slides. Further, it’s missing critical features that are required for successful deployment.
How does the PowerPoint Reuse Slides feature work?
- Open the Reuse Slides pane in PowerPoint and run a search. Note that you need Office ProPlus to access the search bar.
- PowerPoint finds files from across your computer, OneDrive, and SharePoint that match the search. A thumbnail of the title slide is shown.
- Select the file you are interested in and thumbnails for all the slides in the presentation are displayed. Click on any of the slides that you want to reuse to insert them into your active presentation.
Reuse Slides finds files from within PowerPoint. It doesn’t reveal specific slides that best match your search. You can’t quickly find the slide you need and well-matched slides in poorly matched presentations will never be surfaced.
TeamSlide provides a true slide search solution with an enterprise-ready feature set
TeamSlide is a PowerPoint add-in that enables you to search across your PowerPoint presentation repositories to find slides that best match your needs. Instead of returning files, TeamSlide surfaces the best slides from across all your presentations with a thumbnail preview of the slide. With TeamSlide you can search local folders, Outlook attachments, cloud drives like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, and content management systems like SharePoint.
Top 5 Enterprise-ready Features of TeamSlide:
#1: Search
TeamSlide Leverages metadata and the known structure of slides and knowledge repositories to improve search relevancy
- Filter search results based on any metadata property
- Identify the title of slides and treat differently
#2: UI
Detailed design to match the unique needs of PowerPoint users
- Modify the size of preview images
- Provide insight into slide details (e.g. metadata)
#3: Security
Protects data from potential abuse
- Access control: only access slides after logging in and potential checks (e.g. role, project-based, limitation per time frame)
- Integration with internal systems (e.g. deny login based on specific conditions)
#4: Integration
Tightly integrates with non-Microsoft services to unlock critical value
- Automation options (e.g. links on your website opens TeamSlide search in PowerPoint)
- Integration with non-Microsoft services like Box
#5: Advanced
Processes slides to meet advanced workflow demands
- Automatically update old slides on users’ computers
- Content update workflow (e.g. allow users to suggest new slides and slide updates)
