Protecting a Presentation

Quick reference

• 00:04 One of the major hazards when it comes to sharing your presentation with other
• 00:08 people is that there is always the chance that someone could accidentally change
• 00:13 your presentation.
• 00:15 If you imagine this scenario you've spent hours or
• 00:18 even days creating this beautiful PowerPoint presentation.
• 00:22 You send it to your colleague in another office.
• 00:25 And before you know it, they've accidentally changed something and
• 00:28 they can't really remember what they've done.
• 00:31 It's then going to take you extra time to put that presentation back to how it
• 00:35 was originally.
• 00:37 So having a way to safeguard your presentations
• 00:40 from accidental mistakes is extremely important.
• 00:43 Unfortunately, in PowerPoint as with all of the other Microsoft applications,
• 00:48 there are numerous different ways that you can protect your presentation.
• 00:52 So let's take a look at some of the options that we have.
• 00:55 Now when it comes to protection,
• 00:56 you're going to find all of your options in that backstage area.
• 00:59 So we need to go back to File.
• 01:01 And once again, we're jumping down to the Info page.
• 01:05 Now before we get to protecting our presentation, there is something else in
• 01:08 here that I just like to highlight because it's extremely important.
• 01:13 The presentation that we've created whilst it's not extremely long does have quite
• 01:17 a few slides in there.
• 01:19 And it is a very graphic's heavy presentation.
• 01:22 I've used lots of images, I have a video in there, icons,
• 01:25 all different kinds of things like that.
• 01:28 And images and videos take up a lot of space.
• 01:31 So this file size currently is 134 meg, which is pretty large.
• 01:37 Now when presentations start to get this size,
• 01:39 you can start to experience poor performance.
• 01:43 So what I will always recommend you do is that when you have completed your
• 01:47 presentation, jump into here and go to this compress media option.
• 01:52 And from here, you can choose the quality of your presentation.
• 01:55 So Full HD is the top one.
• 01:58 It will save you a little bit of space by compressing it to this, but
• 02:02 not as much as these other two options.
• 02:05 So I always find a happy medium is to compress to 720p.
• 02:09 So I'm going to do that first of all before protecting this presentation.
• 02:13 You can see that it runs through a compression process.
• 02:19 And you can see that after compression, I've now saved myself 43.7 meg.
• 02:25 Let's click on Close.
• 02:27 So now that we've done that, let's take a look at protecting.
• 02:31 The button below is going to show us our protection options.
• 02:34 And I'm going to run through three of these with you.
• 02:37 So the first one here is to always open this presentation in read-only mode.
• 02:42 Now read-only mode is basically there to prevent accidental changes.
• 02:46 It doesn't lock the presentation down.
• 02:48 It doesn't lock people out of it.
• 02:50 They don't need to type in any kind of password, what they will see when they
• 02:54 open the file is a yellow bar across the top that says read-only.
• 02:58 And in order to make any changes to that presentation,
• 03:01 they basically need to opt in by clicking in the yellow bar.
• 03:04 So it's a way of avoiding accidental leaning on the keyboard or
• 03:08 anything along those lines.
• 03:11 So let's apply read-only.
• 03:13 And I'm going to close down this file and then reopen it.
• 03:16 And there you go.
• 03:17 You can see that yellow bar running across the top it says read-only.
• 03:21 To prevent accidental changes, the author has set this file to open as read-only.
• 03:26 So in order to make any changes,
• 03:28 my colleague has to click the Edit Anyway buttons.
• 03:31 So they're making a conscious choice to edit this presentation.
• 03:35 So that is your first option.
• 03:37 Let's go back to File and go down to Info.
• 03:40 And I'm just going to remove that read-only access.
• 03:44 The second option you have is to encrypt your file with a password.
• 03:48 Whoever you send this to also needs the password in order to edit that file.
• 03:53 So let's select this option.
• 03:55 And let's type in a password.
• 03:59 It will ask you to confirm.
• 04:02 And there we go.
• 04:03 Let's close it down.
• 04:05 And you'll see straightaway it's asking me to provide that password.
• 04:08 Once I've typed that successfully, it's going to let me into that presentation.
• 04:15 And I can start to make edits.
• 04:18 So that is option number two.
• 04:20 Back into File, down to Info.
• 04:23 The third option here is to add a digital signature.
• 04:26 Now I'm not going to cover this option because it's quite advanced.
• 04:29 And is probably the one you're least likely to use.
• 04:32 You can essentially add an invisible signature to your file.
• 04:36 And to do this, you need to sign up to a digital signature service.
• 04:40 And in some cases, pay a fee for the luxury.
• 04:44 So we're going to leave this option for now.
• 04:45 And move straight on to the mark as final option.
• 04:49 So this basically lets readers know that this is the final version of this
• 04:53 presentation.
• 04:54 And no more changes are to be made.
• 04:56 So let's click this, and then say, OK.
• 04:59 So at this point, PowerPoint is going to pop up a little warning message,
• 05:03 which is going to tell you exactly what this mark as final option does.
• 05:07 So it says,
• 05:08 this document has been marked as final to indicate that editing is complete.
• 05:12 And that this is the final version of the document.
• 05:15 When a document is marked as final, the status property is set to final.
• 05:20 And typing editing commands, and proofing marks are turned off.
• 05:24 You can recognize the document is marked as final when the mark as final icon
• 05:28 displays in the status bar.
• 05:31 So let's click on OK.
• 05:33 So as soon as I've done that, you can see what happens to my presentation.
• 05:37 I get this yellow warning row across the top just letting me know
• 05:40 that this is marked as final.
• 05:42 Of course, I could just click the Edit Anyway button, but
• 05:45 I have to make a conscious decision to do that.
• 05:48 You'll also know that in the status bar,
• 05:50 I have a new icon which tells me that this is marked as final.
• 05:54 And if we go to File and down into Info, and view all of the properties for
• 05:59 this document, you can see that the status has also been changed to final.
• 06:05 Now I'm actually going to go back into here, and
• 06:08 I'm going to remove mark as final.
• 06:10 And I'm also going to remove the password from this file as well.
• 06:14 So all I need to do here is delete all that password and click on OK.
• 06:19 So those are the three options that you have when it comes to protecting this
• 06:23 presentation prior to sharing it with others.
• 06:26 And that's exactly what we're working towards doing.
• 06:29 In the next section, we're going to take a look at exporting, printing,
• 06:32 and of course, sharing.
• 06:34 So I'm going to head across there now.
• 06:36 And I look forward to you joining me.

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