Managing Knowledge Captured in Powerpoints
As a public speaker I do a great deal of research on industry trends, best practices, emerging technologies,etc. I summarize my research in ppt for my presentations.
My challenge is that I have hundreds of presentations containing years worth of information with no simple means of finding and retrieving what I need.
Does anyone have any recommended strategies or applications to tackle this issue?
Good Answers (5)
Michael B
Director of North American Sales & Operations at it's learning AS
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Hi Kevin,
A lot of how you approach this will depend on what sort of resources you want to put into the project.
-- Google Desktop
If you want to just index and reference the existing PPTs, I'd start with something like Google Desktop, which should search inside all your files and give you access to the search results.
In general I'm only a moderate fan of this as it seems to use a lot of system resources, but it does work.
Other solutions to convert PPTs to other formats are generally very "lossy" loosing graphics and animations and sometimes formatting, but here are some options:
-- "Save As Outline" from PPT
This will maintain some consistency of the formatting and give you various bulleted lists, but graphics and illustrations will be long-gone.
You'll have to do this one deck at a time, but can use any version of Office to do it.
-- "Save As HTML"
Generally this just creates JPEGs of each slide... doesn't gain you access to the "information"
-- Batch Convert from Word
From File->New->Templates->Other Publications you can start the Batch Conversino wizard that will let you navigate to a directory of PPTs and convert them all to Word. I've found this is lossier then the "Save As" method.
-- Word 2007
If you have Office 2007 you should be able to to save the PPTs as Office XML and open in a variety of formats (again, using MS Office 2007).
I think this would be the most promising approach.
Managing/understanding the XML will take some commitment on your part... Does anyone know of ways to manage Office XML easily in this kind of context?
Hope this helps!
Michael
Hello Kevin,
Another search tool suitable for text indexing is Lookout (see the link). The advantage about this one is an integration into Outlook and indexing the e-mails with attachments besides the standard document search.
If you are looking for a more long-term solution, or willing to invest some money into a knowledge database, I would propose some software either for your web-app (see exemplary link) or just some off-line DB which you would use by yourself. A student might enter the information based on the defined structure, search, information management and future references than used over a standard interface by yourself.
Links:
Philip S
Director Owner at Minutecoach Limited
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Hi Kevin,
I'd suggest you convert to pdf files. These will maintain the text and graphics, and you can then organise a pdf library / search tool i.e. the text will be searchable.
The library will use metadata/tags attached to the pdf files.
O.K. I know, how much will it cost?
0) Cute pdf. It's free, sets up as a new printer. But it might not be enough, you have to do all the work yourself.
1) Try Adobe's online pdf creation. The month's subscription is $9.99 for unlimited upload of your presentations (and you can OCR other stuff if need be). You get 5 free goes.
1A) If not, batch make them with pdf995 (that's about $9 - $30 dollars).
O.K. A few days pass, now we have a shed-load of pdfs.
2) Organise them within your regular folder system, or be swish: download iTunes from Apple if you don't already have it (free), and organise them in ITunes with Smart folders and tags. Both of those are $0 dollars.
3) Not sure the one you want is in your search results? Adobe Acrobat Reader. The current 8.1.1 version provides a preview mode.
Just in case, and so you can see what it should be like, on the mac I'd suggest Yep. In OS X you don't need anything on the pdf creation side, it all comes baked in.
http://ironicsoftware.com/yep/index.html
Philip
Links:
- http://www.acrosoftware.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp
- http://createpdf.adobe.com/?v=AFP
- http://lifehacker.com/software/pdf/geek-to-live--organize-your-pdf-library-...
Clarification added October 24, 2007:
Forgot to mention - with this method you can now of course email these through to people regardless of platform - they don't need to have PowerPoint either if you embed the fonts - and it will still look like your presentation.
Clarification added October 24, 2007:
Sorry - clarification should have read " - they don't need to have PowerPoint. They don't need matching fonts either if you embed the fonts - ..."
Hi Kevin
I have 20 years worth of project documentation in MS-Word, PPT, excel and some plain text. Google desktop does it for me.
For other purposes I will install a Document Management system soon.
Cheers
ingo
Robert D
interim management, Consultancy Microsoft Dynamics NAV, IT management,freelance, mind mapping, problem diagnosis,
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Hi Kevin,
As mentioned in other interventions, some kind of indexing tool might prove to be practical. But simply entering a few keywords in the hope of finding back specific information may be like trying to find the needle in the hay stack.
Another problem you may face is that industry trends, technology etc tend to be in a constant evolution. How would you evaluate the relevance of the information? How will you keep the information up-to-date - if required at all? In what form will you store the knowledge? As complete presentations, or in chunks representing specific ideas? I would subdivide the presentations. It makes them much more manageable AND reusable. And a search will provide more specific results.
A new presentation would then typically be a compilation of standard, up-to-date elements (intro, ...), complemented by specific components.
I like the approach with mindmaps very much. It allows to make a summary on a single page of an elaborate presentation. Furthermore, it allows to link powerpoints, text etc to specific topics of the mindmap.
And you can easily create new mindmap, based on elements of existing ones. All attachments are then copied automatically.
