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First, how NOT to protect a presentation
Whatever anyone may tell you, saving your presentation as a PowerPoint Show (PPS, PPSX) file offers almost no protection at all.
Don't believe us? Start PowerPoint, choose File, Open and browse to your "protected" show file and click Open. How secure was that? ;-)
How to protect a presentation
First, consider what you're trying to protect and why.
Do you need to protect critical information contained in the presentation? You may be able to prevent me from copying the presentation or the file that contains it, but if I can see the information, I can copy it one way or another.
If that's not acceptable, you'd probably better not distribute the presentation at all.
Do you need to protect the presentation itself? That is, the way you've presented the information rather than the information itself? For example, you might want to keep someone else from copying the presentation and passing it off as their own. Or from altering the information in a way that might embarass you.
In that case, one of the solutions suggested below may meet your needs.
Solutions
PowerPoint 2003 offers a feature called "Information Rights Management" that allows you to exercise considerable control over who has access to your PowerPoint presentations and what they can do with them. It's only practical for large corporate/institutional users, as it requires special server software. To learn more, start PowerPoint and search Help for "information rights management".
PowerPoint 2002 (XP) and later versions can password protect your presentations. This allows you some control over who can open and/or edit/print them. You can password protect your presentations so they can only be opened by those who have the password, or allow anyone to open them but protect them against modification.
PowerPoint 2000, earlier versions and Mac PowerPoint versions don't support password protection. You can't password protect presentations with them and you can't open password protected presentations from later versions. Instead, you see a message saying that the PowerPoint file is corrupted and can't be opened.
The free PowerPoint Viewer 2003 can open and view password protected files though. If your intended audience uses Windows 98SE or later and is willing to install it, that may be the solution you're after.
Here are a few alternatives that may work for you depending on the level of protection you need:
Create a standalone EXE version of your presentation with optional password protection
You can create a self-installing package that includes the PowerPoint viewer and a PPT file. PowerPoint MVP Geetesh Bajaj explains how to do this with PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint XP (2002)
Distribute a show file instead of a presentation file
Rename your presentation from .PPT to .PPS
This doesn't change the presentation in any way, nor does it really secure it, but when naive users doubleclick it, it starts PowerPoint directly in Slide Show mode. They won't have the opportunity to edit the file. Experienced PPT users know that all they have to do is start PowerPoint then File, Open to open either PPT or PPS files.
Distribute a show within a show
A Powerpoint newsgroup user (you know who you are, Glenna) suggests this devilishly devious trick:
- Create and save your presentation as a PPS file.
- Open a new presentation, click on Insert, Object, Create From File and select the PPS file you just created. Do not check the link or icon box.
- Resize your embedded PPS (powerpoint show) to cover the whole screen.
- Use the custom animations setting to make it run automatically, etc. However you want it to appear.
- Make sure your Multimedia setting is set to SHOW.
- Save your new file as PPS. You may have to experiment a little to get the exact results you want.
A really knowledgeable PowerPoint user may still be able to get around this trick, but it should work quite well in most cases. And it's simple. And free.
Zip it
Distribute your presentation inside a password-protected ZIP file or self-extracting EXE created from a ZIP file. Software and knowhow about ZIP files here
Embed it
PowerPoint 2000 and earlier don't allow password protection, but Word and Excel do. You can embed your PowerPoint presentation in a Word or Excel file, then apply a password to the Word or Excel file.
Only people who have the password will be able to open the "container" Word/Excel file and from there open the PowerPoint file embedded within. People with the password will have complete access to the embedded PowerPoint file; they'll be able to edit it even extract it to a standalone PPT file.
Don't distribute your real presentation
Distribute a presentation that contains only pictures of your presentation. Export each slide in your presentation to a WMF or bitmap (JPG, PNG, etc.) file, then import each of these files into a new presentation and scale them up to fill the slide. WMF will usually make for a smaller presentation, but can be ungrouped and edited to some degree; bitmap files can't be edited but will make your presentation file size larger.
The PPTools Protect PowerPoint add-in automates the process and adds a few niceties.
Distribute Acrobat/PDF files instead of PPT files
You can use Adobe's Acrobat or other software to convert your PPT presentations to PDF files. These can be password protected in two ways, against opening/viewing the file and against editing the file and/or copying text and graphics from it.
More about making PDFs here and about making PDFs from PowerPoint here How can I make Acrobat PDFs from PowerPoint?
PDFs can also include embedded fonts, meaning that it's easier to ensure that your presentation's appearance doesn't change depending on what fonts are available on the system where it's viewed.
Acrobat files can be very compact if created properly.
The free Reader for PDF files is probably already installed on many more computers than the PowerPoint viewer, so that's one less issue to contend with when you distribute your presentations. Reader is available for download from Adobe's web site
PDFs support page-to-page transitions but not animation, so all of your animations in PowerPoint will be lost when you convert to PDF.
PDFs support hyperlinks, but most methods of making PDFs don't translate all of PowerPoint's links and other interactive features into PDF. If you need to preserve as many of these features as possible, use our PPTools Prep4PDF add-in
See PowerPoint vs. Acrobat for a comparison of the two programs as presentation distribution methods.
Distribute an AVI movie of your presentation
This suggestion from Dean Craven:
There is also the "convert your PPT presentation to an AVI movie file" solution. Our screen camcorder and video production tool "Camtasia" can record anything on the desktop and produce standard AVI files. Camtasia can also produce Microsoft and Real streaming video files. For simple screen video capture tasks, also checkout our screen capture tool "SnagIt". Fully functional evals available here
Secure Pack
Another approach to distributing secured PowerPoint presentations is available from PowerPoint MVP Shyam Pillai. Salient features of Secure Pack:
- Pack single or multiple presentations into a single executable to be distributed.
- Hyperlinks and linked files, True Type fonts can be included. Cross linkages are resolved during pre-packing processing.
- Long file names supported
- Limit the number of times the show is executed.
- Enable editing support. Set archive password for extraction.
- Program group/Short cut links created for Viewing/Editing created on the Start Menu on first run
- Autorun.inf created
- Twin Security modes: High/Medium
- Clear Personal information from files.
- Supported on 95/98/98SE/ME/NT/2000
Secure Pack - Distribute PowerPointŪ presentations securely
Rhapzode
A product called Rhapzode allows you to compile your PPT into an easily distributable format that doesn't require the end user to have PowerPoint installed. For more information, please see PowerPoint MVP Shawn Toh's tutorial here.
PrezGuard Pro
If you need to retain all of your PowerPoint animations and hyperlinks and distribute a real -- but secure -- PowerPoint presentation, your best bet is PrezGuard Pro.
PrezGuard Pro lets you protect your presentation files but still allow them to be viewed in PowerPoint or the PowerPoint Viewer.
For more information or to download a shareware version to try out, visit the ALADat web site
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Contents © 1995-2008 Stephen Rindsberg, Rindsberg Photography, Inc. and members of the MS PowerPoint MVP team. You may link to this page but any form of unauthorized reproduction of this page's contents is expressly forbidden.
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