PowerPoint presentations can be used in a variety of workplace situations — for employee training, sales pitches, event presentations and to secure corporate contracts, to name just a few.
Good presentations can take several days, weeks or even months to pull together, beginning with formulating a cohesive and powerful storyboard and sourcing pertinent data and statistics, depending on the presentation topic. And this is all before the pen is put to paper, so to speak!
With the time it takes to formulate and complete an excellent PowerPoint presentation – and with the wealth of important and private information it might include — it’s easy to understand how it’s important to take some steps to protect your work, whether from corruption, edits, or outside access.
Why Should You Protect Your Presentation?
While your presentation will most likely be stored on a computer, USB, cloud, or database that’s password protected, trouble can still ensue when you need to email or share your presentation.
Your recipient’s email account could be compromised; they could edit the presentation, either unintentionally by innocently adding errors, or, more nefariously, while passing it off as their own; or they could edit it and send the content to others under your company name.
While scenarios such as these are few and far between, anyway to protect your company and its data from misuse should be seriously considered, especially if your presentation holds sensitive information.
This might include details about a new product or service you’re designing, data about past or pending deals, information about marketing strategies, data on clients, or any current financial information or projections.
A data breach pertaining to information such as this— in extreme cases — could sully client relations. It could offer rivals insight into your plans for the foreseeable future; it may tarnish the public’s perception of your company; and it could be used for blackmail against you, your shareholders, and your associates.
With this in mind, there are a few strategies to protect your private or confidential PowerPoint presentations, safeguarding you and your clients against a data breach — whether you’re creating your presentation in-house, or you’ve secured help from a professional presentation company to give your PowerPoint an elite edge.
Curb Unwanted Changes and Edits
This feature is handy to safeguard data and protects your PowerPoint presentation from falling victim to human error — which is not only likely, but sometimes inevitable.
Depending on your systems, there are multiple ways to add layers of safety. The most direct ways are as follows.
- Open your presentation. Click ‘File’ then ‘Info.’ You’ll see a ‘Protect Presentation’ button. By clicking this option, you can choose to ‘Restrict Access’ from a dropdown menu. After selecting the ‘Restricted Access’ option, in the next menu box — called ‘Permission’ — you can designate access (to either ‘read’ or ‘edit’) to specific email addresses.
- If you don’t want to customize specific emails, you can also make your presentation ‘Read Only’ before you send it to the desired recipients. This will mean that they likely won’t make accidental edits; to edit the work, they’ll have to choose, intentionally, to make edits and edit despite warnings of the file being ‘Read Only.’ To do this, click on ‘File,’ then ‘Info,’ then ‘Protect Presentation,’ then on ‘Always Open Read Only.’
Not only do these features protect your file from being edited, but they also politely let the recipient know to handle the document with care and to keep it the way it is!
Add a Password to Prevent Unauthorized Viewing
Forget editing — it’s also simple to add a password to prevent unauthorized reading. Open your presentation, then click the ‘File’ option.
Click that ‘Protect Presentation’ button again and choose the ‘Encrypt with Password’ option from the dropdown menu. Here, you can select a password that will be necessary to input should anyone want to view the file, period.
The Takeaway on PowerPoint Protections
While it’s highly unlikely an external partner will use your PowerPoint presentation with ill intent, human error can happen.
By adding an extra layer of protection to a presentation that’s potentially rife with company assets – whether you make your PowerPoints read only, or if you add a password to prevent erroneous access — you’re implementing a buffer, a backup fail-safe, that can keep your presentation secure from being seen by uninvited parties, or subject to unwanted intentional or unintentional edits.
