PowerPoint Security

Are you a busy PowerPoint user who wants to improve PowerPoint security? Recently, I paid much attention to the security of the PowerPoint presentation: We spend much time creating a PowerPoint presentation. When sharing our presentation with others, we often worry about the security of it, and worry about being modified by others. So we usually want to take some methods to improve the PowerPoint security.

It is awful to see your PowerPoint presentation appears somewhere with some information changed, especially, your name changed! The fact is that most time we have to hand out our PowerPoint presentation for some reasons. We can do something to protect our PowerPoint presentation. Here are some methods to improve your PowerPoint security and their disadvantages:

The first way to improve the security is to use the functions PowerPoint itself provides.

Password protecting in PowerPoint 2003.

Open the presentation that you want to set a password for. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Security tab. In this dialog box you can set password for viewing PowerPoint and modifying PowerPoint.

But this function is not really safe when you are using PowerPoint 2003 because when you choose Compare and Combine the presentation, the password protect can be avoid easily.

Password protecting in PowerPoint 2007.

Encrypt Document, File->Prepare->Encrypt Document. You can set a password to protect your PowerPoint presentation. It is similar with in 2003.

File->Prepare->Restrict Permission, give the permission to the person who you trust by their E-mail account.
Add a Digital Signature. You can add a Digital Signature in your presentation to protect it.

Mark as Final. Choose the option of Mark as Final, after that, nobody can modify your presentation including yourself, but as it to me, compared with the methods above, I prefer this one.

The second way to improve the PowerPoint security is to use some programs to convert your PowerPoint presentation to video format.

Besides the benefit of improving the security of your presentation, you can also make it convenient for the person who has not PowerPoint installed. It is convenient for delivery.

Using PPT2DVD to convert your PowerPoint to DVD. You can image how safe your presentation is. The person who receives your presentation can only view your presentation on DVD!

Using PPT to Video to convert your presentation to video format such as MPEG, AVI, MP4, WMV, MOV and 3GP. Besides the security problem, have you ever thought that PowerPoint could be uploaded to YouTube? Yes, PPT to video can save your presentation to YouTube, IPod, iPhone, Zune and so on.

Saving the presentation in JEPG format then using Windows Movie Maker. It is easy but we cannot keep the animations, transitions, sounds, video clips and other things in the original PowerPoint retained. This method is similar with the one by converting your PowerPoint presentation to PDF format.

Choose the method you like and improve the security of your PowerPoint presentation, and get the benefit of it.