Effective knowledge sharing in PowerPoint

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Effective knowledge sharing aids consistency and brand-compliance, speeding up workflows and freeing up time to make more creative PowerPoint presentations.

We’ll address some common barriers to knowledge sharing and suggest some measures you can implement to improve collaboration and increase efficiency in your teams.

Enjoy the read!

A culture of collaboration

First up, you won’t get anywhere without a company culture that values teamwork and collaboration. Building a culture isn’t just a technology issue, but you can certainly support its development by removing technical barriers and equipping your teams with the tools they need to easily work together, share knowledge, and operate as a unified team.

Workspace apps for knowledge sharing

To support their teams’ collaboration, many companies invest in a workspace app like Loop, Notion or Confluence. These provide a centralized space where everyone can create and share wikis, documents, how-tos, links, meeting notes and other materials.

Workspace apps offer a high level of flexibility but a drawback is that a user will always have to go to their browser and break their presentation creation workflow to look for the assets or information they need.

App-switching is an instant drain on productivity, which is why we’ll look at ways for teams to share knowledge without leaving the PowerPoint environment.

Democratize access to PowerPoint assets

The most fundamental prerequisite for knowledge sharing is democratizing access to assets, which means more than just saving presentations on a team SharePoint. For real democratization, everyone should not only be able to technically access what they need, but also be able to find what they are looking for quickly and independently.

Teammates can support each other by adhering to a logical folder structure and understanding that everyone benefits from a disciplined approach to knowledge sharing. Besides building this culture, there are three practical ways you can help ensure shared folders function as genuinely useful knowledge repositories:

• Unambiguous ownership: Someone needs to own the process, including defining the folder structure, and communicating and enforcing best practices amongst the team. It’s fine to assign different folders to different owners, but any folder without clear ownership will quickly become an uncurated dumping ground.
• Naming conventions: It saves everyone time when teams use clear naming conventions that help you sort files and tell the difference between versions without having to open the presentations. Part of ownership is ensuring that agreed conventions are followed.
• Regular housekeeping: Even when teams follow best practices, it’s important to regularly review the contents of shared folders to remove duplicates and delete any outdated presentations. Shared folders are only useful if people can trust that the assets they find there are correct and suitable for use in their presentations.

Simple measures like these will help cut the time everyone spends between pressing CTRL+O in PowerPoint and finding the presentation they’re looking for.

Corporate slides decks and templates

Well-designed corporate templates are essential if you want teams across your organization to build brand-compliant presentations. As well as creating and maintaining the templates, you need to educate your teams about where to find them and how to use them properly. At thinkcell, we have a light and dark variant of our presentation template, and they are introduced to all new employees as part of the onboarding process.

Corporate templates are perfect if you’re starting from scratch, but people will often want to save time by looking for an existing presentation they can reuse and adapt. This makes it all the more important that only brand-compliant resources based on the official templates are shared, as otherwise inconsistencies can be replicated in future presentations.

Reusing slides with Copilot

If you have access to Copilot in PowerPoint, it can help you identify slides to use in your presentations. In the Copilot side panel, you can ask it to search for slides on a certain topic and it will suggest potentially relevant results, including a link, a short summary, and information on who created or edited the presentation.

While this can be faster than trawling through SharePoint folders yourself, you will still have to open up the individual presentations and navigate to the relevant slide before you can see whether it will really help your presentation.

Also, this kind of AI-powered search lacks precision and completeness, as you are dependent on the suggestions Copilot makes. If you are looking for a specific presentation you know exists but you’re not sure where, you may have to refine your search before it appears amongst the recommendations.

Knowledge sharing with the thinkcell Library

The thinkcell Library addresses some of the most common barriers to knowledge sharing and helps teams collaborate more effectively within PowerPoint.

Pinpointing the slide you need

A big issue with shared folders or even Copilot is that finding the file you need is only part of the journey. In most cases, there will be a specific slide you’re looking for, rather than an entire presentation.

That’s why the thinkcell Library includes several filters and sorting options, and shows you the individual slides that match your query. From the results, the high-resolution previews let you zoom in to see exactly what you need and add it to your deck, without having to open up any other presentations.

Combining collaboration with individual flexibility

The way thinkcell Library works, each individual can set up their own preferred folders to link the assets they want. It’s easy to link a shared team folder, and each team member can choose whether they want subfolders or not.

Giving ownership of their own library structure to each individual means everyone is free to add the folders they need, and anyone can include their own favorite presentations and visual assets, without interfering with the team’s shared directory structure.

Maintaining brand compliance

With the thinkcell Library, you don’t have to worry about the formatting of an old slide. If you need a specific slide master or aspect ratio, you can apply the filters so you won’t waste time adapting old layouts.

And when you’re inserting a template or an example slide, the thinkcell Library will adapt it so that all colors, fonts and visual elements match your current presentation’s theme. This means you don’t have to update any branding and you can easily reuse your favorite slides for different departments, sub-brands or customer presentations.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Behind the slides, and maybe we’ve inspired you to revisit your team’s approach to knowledge sharing in PowerPoint.

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