Show All

Hide All

Since there are several ways to collaborate in PowerPoint, it's important to determine which collaboration method is best for you. This article provides you with possible solutions for the collaboration challenges you may encounter.

Send a presentation for review

Suppose you need to deliver a project presentation for your company at an annual conference, and to ensure that you are covering all the aspects of the project, you would like to collect some input from the other members of your project team. By using PowerPoint along with Microsoft Outlook®, you can send a presentation for review so that others can add comments and make changes to their copies of the presentation without using a hard copy markup or other slow revision methods. As presentations are completed by your team members and sent back to you, you can merge them with your original copy of the presentation, and then you can use the reviewing tools in PowerPoint to apply your team members' changes and incorporate them into your presentation.

For more information about sending a presentation for review, see PowerPoint Help.

Technical requirements for presentation reviews

Host an online meeting

As team manager for an ongoing project, you have just been asked to prepare a presentation of your team's findings thus far. You need help from some of the members of your project team, but they are located in another city. By using PowerPoint and Microsoft NetMeeting®, you can start an online meeting from within PowerPoint and then work jointly on the presentation, send each other text messages in Chat, transfer files, and work on the Whiteboard in real time with the people at the remote site.

For more information about online meetings, see PowerPoint Help.

Technical requirements for online meetings

Choose a different collaboration option

The following options provide collaboration solutions for situations when you do not have a 32-bit e-mail program compatible with the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI); the file size of the presentation is too large to send via e-mail; you do not have a high-speed connection to a server; or, you just want to post a presentation for others to see or download. All of these options allow for others to view your presentation, but most involve settings that do not allow others to make modifications to your presentation.

Conduct a Web discussion   You can conduct a Web discussion of a presentation if your team has access to a Web server running Microsoft Office Server Extensions. The threaded discussion is much like discussing something via e-mail, only all of your team members' comments are kept in one place and there is no need to send e-mail messages back and forth to one another. Team members will not be able to insert comments to individual slides or items on a slide in a presentation, but they will be able to add comments about the overall presentation.

Create a Web site   You can use Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to create a Web site on which you can store presentations and other documents for team members to access and modify.

Create a shared folder   You can create a shared folder on your computer that others can access, and then place the presentation in that folder. Anyone who has permission to access the shared folder can then insert comments directly in your presentation.

Post a presentation to a public folder   You can post your presentation to a Microsoft Exchange public folder when you want to make a presentation available to others but you don't want to send it in an e-mail message. Anyone who has permission to access the public folder can then insert comments directly in your presentation.

Save a presentation to a Web server   You can save a complete presentation, a custom show, a single slide, or a range of slides to a Web server if you want others to view your presentation. You can also save your presentation as a Web page for others to view.

Save a presentation to an FTP site   You can add FTP sites to the list of available Internet sites if you have access to the Internet and want others to view your presentation. In addition, if you have access rights and the FTP site supports saving files, you can save presentations to the Internet from the Save As dialog box (File menu) in PowerPoint.

For more information about these additional collaboration methods, see PowerPoint Help.