Reconciling Reviews
If you're the author of a presentation, the final step includes merging the reviews, checking the comments and changes of all reviewers, accepting or rejecting their suggestions using the Revisions pane or Reviewing toolbar, and saving your final presentation.
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There is no one right way to handle the review and reconciliation process. You can use a combination of features on the Revisions pane List and Gallery tabs and on the Reviewing toolbar to complete your presentation.
Comparing and Merging Presentations
If you're using Outlook to do revisions, open the e-mail that contains the reviewed presentation, double-click it, and click Yes in the prompt dialog box that asks if you want to merge this presentation. PowerPoint automatically merges this presentation with the original.
If you're using another e-mail program, a network server, or a disk to handle reviews, follow these steps:
Open the original presentation in PowerPoint.
Choose Tools, Compare and Merge Presentations. The Choose Files to Merge with Current Presentation dialog box opens (see Figure 7.4).
Select a file (or files) to merge and click the Merge button. The presentations are merged and the Revisions pane opens. Other buttons may be added to the Reviewing toolbar.
Using the Revisions Pane to Reconcile Reviews
The Revisions pane enables you to view and reconcile the comments and changes of multiple reviewers. It should appear automatically when you compare and merge presentations, but you can also open it manually by choosing View, Toolbars, Revisions Pane. Figure 7.5 illustrates the Revisions pane.
Figure 7.4. Comparing and merging your presentation enables you to see all reviewers'comments in the same place.
Figure 7.5. Use the Revisions pane to look at reviewers'changes and accept or reject them.
The List tab displays color-coded comments and changes for each reviewer. To see those for specific reviewers, select them from the Reviewers drop-down list. The default is to display the comments of all reviewers.
On the List tab, you can click an individual comment to view it and then click the Delete Comment button on the Reviewing toolbar to remove it from your presentation. Depending on the contents of the comment, you might want to make additional changes to your presentation. If the comment is informational only (“Great presentation!”), you can continue to the next review item.
On the List tab, you can also click a change marker to display its contents and click in the check boxes if you want to accept the changes. You can also hover the mouse over a change marker on your slide to view the proposed change. Then click on that change marker to display the menu with check boxes for accepting changes (or in some cases, an individual change).
To move to the next slide, click the Next button on the pane. To go back to a previous slide, click Previous.
On the Gallery tab, you view thumbnails of the changed slides by reviewer.
On this tab, you can click the check box next to the name of a reviewer to apply all changes suggested by that reviewer. You can click the down arrow next to the thumbnail to view a list of other options, including the capability to apply changes, unapply changes, view only a specific reviewer's changes, preview animation, or tell PowerPoint that you're done with that reviewer.