Before you share a presentation, there are a couple things you can do to finalize and
protect it.
You'll find everything you need in the backstage view… under Protect Presentation and Inspect
Presentation.
Inspect Presentation will let you remove any hidden personal information that's stored
in the file itself.
It'll also check for elements that you generally don't want in the final draft; for example,
notes or comments that you forgot to remove.
Some of the changes from the inspector can't be undone, so it's a good idea to save an
extra copy or your presentation before you continue.
When you're ready, go ahead and click Check for Issues… choose Inspect Document from
the menu… then click Inspect in the dialog box.
The results will appear with an exclamation mark next to anything that may contain sensitive
information.
In this example, it looks like there are some hidden document properties and personal info,
and also some comments that I forgot to delete.
I definitely don't want these in the final draft, so I'm going to take this opportunity
remove them.
Just click the button to the right that says Remove All… and PowerPoint will erase the
data instantly.
I'm also going to remove the personal information the inspector found, because the people I'm
sharing the presentation with don't really need access to it.
Now that our presentation has been finalized, we can protect it to prevent people from making
any further changes.
This step is optional, but it's a great way to control who's allowed to view or edit your
work.
All you have to do is click the Protect Presentation command… and make a selection from the menu.
Some of these options offer a high level of protection, such as Encrypt with Password,
which is good for really important or sensitive files.
If you don't need that much security, though, you might want to consider one of the other
options.
In this case, I'm going to choose Mark as Final, which will make the presentation read-only.
This will discourage people from making any more changes to the file, and also let them
know that this is the final draft.
Once you make your selection, click OK to confirm… then OK again… and the protection
will be applied.
Now when somebody opens the file, they'll see this little bar at the top of the window,
and they won't be able to type or delete anything.
If they do need to make changes, they can just click the button that says Edit Anyway.
This option doesn't provide any actual security for your presentation; however, it's a good
way to keep people from changing or deleting something by accident.
Now you know how to inspect and protect your presentations using the features in the backstage
view.