Private Annotations on PPT Slides

  • Thread starter Thread starter Greg Dunn
  • Start date Start date
G

Greg Dunn

Do any of you have a way to make truly private annotations on PowerPoint
slides? I have explored the approach of deleting notes (or parts of notes)
with the help of some others here, and may go that route...but it that
solution leaves the door open for accidental distribution of private notes
(i.e., one forgets to run the macro to delete them).

When I began looking into this a couple of days I started with a CNET search
on Sticky Note programs. Data produced with those would have the advantage
(okay, the disadvantage, too; but I digress) of being stored separately from
the PowerPoint deck and requiring a special viewer program besides, so that
the danger of accidental note leaks would be lessened. However, I didn't
see anything that looked like I could tie a note to a specific slide --
which I'm also looking for, since slides are otherwise hard to identify
uniquely (without a lot of work), and tend to move around in Presentations.

The ideal option would be encrypted notes embedded in the PowerPoint deck
itself, but last time I looked that wasn't supported. 8-)

The macro-deleted notes may still be the best option, but just checking for
other ideas...

Thanks,

Greg Dunn
 
Do any of you have a way to make truly private annotations on PowerPoint
slides? I have explored the approach of deleting notes (or parts of notes)
with the help of some others here, and may go that route...but it that
solution leaves the door open for accidental distribution of private notes
(i.e., one forgets to run the macro to delete them).

When I began looking into this a couple of days I started with a CNET search
on Sticky Note programs. Data produced with those would have the advantage
(okay, the disadvantage, too; but I digress) of being stored separately from
the PowerPoint deck and requiring a special viewer program besides, so that
the danger of accidental note leaks would be lessened. However, I didn't
see anything that looked like I could tie a note to a specific slide --
which I'm also looking for, since slides are otherwise hard to identify
uniquely (without a lot of work), and tend to move around in Presentations.

The ideal option would be encrypted notes embedded in the PowerPoint deck
itself, but last time I looked that wasn't supported. 8-)
Click to expand...

Not out of the box, but the links Chirag posted suggest the same workaround I
was chewing on. Each shape or slide in PPT can have a virtually unlimited
number of "tags". These are, in effect, invisible "sticky notes" containing
text.

There's no user interface for them, so you'd need to write or find somebody to
write it for you.

The average user would never be able to get at these. For another level of
security, you (well, the program you write) could encrypt the text in the tags
before storing it.

Of course, next you might need a way to display each set of notes along with
its slide. That gets more complex and probably involves including it in notes
or other visible PPT shapes and now we're back to the possibility of it getting
out in the wild while still visible. Uh oh. ;-)

On the other hand, what if the existing add-in that you've already tried were
to somehow "flag" slides that have visible content that should be hidden.
Perhaps a red border around the edge of the slide or something like that.
 
There's a swell PowerPoint enhancement suggestion emerging here.
On the other hand, what if the existing add-in that you've already tried
were
to somehow "flag" slides that have visible content that should be hidden.
Perhaps a red border around the edge of the slide or something like that.
Click to expand...

The biggest vulnerability is somebody accidentally or ignorantly
distributing the deck with the stuff not removed, without ever looking
inside the presentations. So I think the approach of using encrypted tags
is probably the most promising one. There will definitely need to be a UI,
though. The instructor (or presentationware developer) needs to see the
annotations right out front when developing or studying the deck, and also
be able to edit them as easily as the notes can be edited.

Unfortunately this is not something I can pursue or wait for at the moment,
so my plan is to keep the annotated decks in a folder named "Blah Blah
(Annotated)", and the distributable version in another folder name "Blah
Blah (For Distribution)", and not let anybody except myself have the former
until I've personally initiated them. It isn't the ideal solution, but at
least I have some way of making annotations where I need them, and easily
removing them (thanks to you, Bill, and others).

Greg
 
Back
Top