how do I prevent someone printing a Powerpoint presentation?

[Guest]

I need to distribute softcopies of a Powerpoint presentation, but don't want
recipients to be able to print hard copies. Is there a way to 'lock' a .ppt
file against printing?

 

[Guest]

I think the simple answer is - NO you can set them up so they print badly eg
by having overlapping text boxes or pictures with fade in / out animations

There may be an add in but I dont know of one.

 

[Guest]

If there aren't many slides, you can try this out.
Manually add a black AutoShape(square) that covers the entire slide. Do it
on one slide first.
Then, click Slide Show > Custom Animation.
Click Add effect > Exit > Disappear.
Set the "Start" to "After Previous", then have it place as the first effect.
By doing so, the black autoshape will disappear upon the start of slideshow.
Copy and paste the black autoshape to all the slides. Make sure the
autoshape is the first to be animated in every slide.

Now, set a password to the presentation to prevent modification (Tools >
Options > Security). Save your presentation. Without the password, users will
only be able to open the presentation as a read only, which doesn't allow
them to move the black autoshape.
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Site Updated: April 13, 2006
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[Guest]

Thats clever Tohlz, you could probably put the shape on the master.

 

[Guest]

John,

Thank you. Actually, while waiting for a reply I just found a partial
solution, which lets me restrict printing to only the titles of each slide:

1) For each slide that has an initial bullet paragraph format (where it says
'click to add text'), I can simply copy that paragraph, delete the original,
and move the copy back over the original location of the bullet paragraph.
Turns out that when you then print in "outline" mode, only the title of each
slide shows, not the bulleted text.

2) Then I just have to define the printing mode as 'outline', and
password-protect the file against modification.

That will let folks see and print the title of each slide, but not any
detailed bullets, tables, illustrations or anything else. I can live with
that.

Thanks for taking the trouble to respond.

A Bass

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I need to distribute softcopies of a Powerpoint presentation, but don't want
recipients to be able to print hard copies. Is there a way to 'lock' a .ppt
file against printing?

Have you considered distributing the presentation as a PDF instead?

You can lock a PDF to prevent printing and a number of other features w/o
requiring the user to enter a password or even being aware that there's
anything unusual about the file. Until they try to print and can't of course.