Mitch Tulloch's Blog

PowerPoint deck cleanup

I recently did a presentation to a group, and afterwards several of the participants asked me if I could send them my PowerPoint 2007 slide deck. I was just going to do this when I realized I had added extensive notes to the deck, and some of these notes contained sensitive information. What I needed to do was scrub my deck by removing all its notes, but since there were over 40 slides, I didn’t want to do this manually slide by slide.

So I did what I usually do when I have a technical question about a Microsoft product—I asked an Office MVP (Most Valuable Professionals) friend of mine if she knew of a shortcut for doing this. Microsoft MVPs are individuals who like sharing their expertise with others, and this particular MVP showed me how to remove all notes (and other junk if desired) from my slide deck. Here's how to do this:

1.       Open your slide deck in PowerPoint 2007.

2.       Click the Office button (the round button at the top left).

3.       Select Prepare, then select Inspect Document to open the Document Inspector dialog.

4.       Make sure Presentation Notes is selected and then click Inspect.

5.       When the inspection results are displayed, click Remove All beside Presentation Notes.

6.       Click Close when done.

Use the above procedure whenever you need to make a PowerPoint deck custom-ready for distribution to users.

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