Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Compare two versions of a PPT file with PowerPoint 2010


There are situations in organisations when more than one person has to work on same presentation. Company CEO or VP sales  might have to add details to their respective slides for an upcoming meeting with stakeholders. In such scenario two version of same presentation get created; one having the information added by CEO and other version having details added by VP sales. Now if you are the one who has the responsibility to create the final version out of these two PowerPoint files, it might take too much of your time to manually figure out the new information added or other changes done to different slides and chances are that you end up creating a presentation having either critical sales information missing or a major typo included which was corrected by CEO in his version of PowerPoint file.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 comes in handy in such situations. PowerPoint 2010 has a nifty 'Compare and merge' feature which lets you compare two versions of same PowerPoint file and let you accept or reject the changes.

Here are steps to compare and merge two versions of a PowerPoint file:

1) Open the first version of PowerPoint file
2) Click on Review tab on Ribbon
3)Click on Compare
4)Open the version 2 of PowerPoint file

You will see a 'Revisions' pane on right side which will display the text changes and any slide additions done to the presentation.

While moving across the slides, you can accept or reject text or slide changes and create a final updated presentation.

Here is a nice video from Microsoft explaining "Compare and merge" feature:


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does not work - The Compare Button and Merge Dialog appear to operate, but after Compare/Merge the 'Revisions Pane' does not appear and the Ribbon buttons remain dimmed. There is no way to view the comparison. Is this compare feature really available in Powerpoint 2010?

Anonymous said...

How do you compare 2 versions of the same document stored in a SharePoint document library with version control ?

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