Comparing different versions of a presentation

[pd]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Does anyone know whether there's a way to compare two different versions of the same Powerpoint presentation, so you can see what changes were made - like the "compare documents" function in Word?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Does anyone know whether there's a way to compare two different versions of the same Powerpoint presentation, so you can see what changes were made - like the "compare documents" function in Word?

Thanks in advance.

Hi,

Actually, using the compare documents feature of Word isn't such a bad
idea. From PowerPoint use File > Send To > Microsoft Word to send the
text of your presentations to Word. Alternatively, you could use File >
Save As and choose Outline format to turn your presentations into text
files that Word can compare.

Because VBA is not supported in PowerPoint 2008, there's not a handy
programmatic way to test the similarity of other objects in the
presentation.

-Jim

 

[Jeff_Chapman]

PowerPoint 2007 for Windows offers the ability to automatically compare two presentations and see where the changes were made, but PowerPoint 2008 for Mac lacks this feature.

One useful workaround if you own Adobe Acrobat (not just the Reader, but the full Acrobat application) is to save both presentations from PowerPoint as a PDF, switch to Acrobat and then use the Advanced - Compare Documents function there. This will give you a good side-by-side detailed visual report on what is different.

Jeff