Vent your PowerPoint demons..

Hi everyone, sorry in advance if this is the incorrect forum.

Ex-monkey here: I made the move from M&A, segued into VC for a bit, and I'm now launching a tech start-up. If you have any questions for me regarding this route, please don't hesitate to PM me and I'll answer when I can. If there is enough interest I'll make a separate thread and publish responses.

One thing that always massively pissed me off as a banker was version-control in PowerPoint: four people working on a project, versions would get mixed up and I'd spend hours fucking with it to get a final slide-deck. We had SharePoint to try and address this, but it was shit and no one used it.

I'm deciding right now whether this has been a massive problem for everyone, or if it was specific to our bank (I've spoken to a lot of people who didn't have this problem as everything was done through printing, paper and pen). I also had a shit-load of trouble with the auto-save feature overwriting my work, and I'd have liked a local version control system which saves every half an hour and then lets me go back to versions.

What would be seriously helpful is if anyone could let me know if they've had similar problems, and vent what seriously pisses them off about powerpoint and this whole process: GO (please)! Will dish out SBs until I run out..

13 Comments
 

Had this problem this exact morning with MS PP.

The other analyst ended up printing the same shit as me 2 minutes after with his formatting changed too.

We had a pitch in 3 minutes.

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Best Response
peatHi everyone, sorry in advance if this is the incorrect forum.

Ex-monkey here: I made the move from M&A, segued into VC for a bit, and I'm now launching a tech start-up. If you have any questions for me regarding this route, please don't hesitate to PM me and I'll answer when I can. If there is enough interest I'll make a separate thread and publish responses.

One thing that always massively pissed me off as a banker was version-control in PowerPoint: four people working on a project, versions would get mixed up and I'd spend hours fucking with it to get a final slide-deck. We had SharePoint to try and address this, but it was shit and no one used it.

I'm deciding right now whether this has been a massive problem for everyone, or if it was specific to our bank (I've spoken to a lot of people who didn't have this problem as everything was done through printing, paper and pen). I also had a shit-load of trouble with the auto-save feature overwriting my work, and I'd have liked a local version control system which saves every half an hour and then lets me go back to versions.

What would be seriously helpful is if anyone could let me know if they've had similar problems, and vent what seriously pisses them off about powerpoint and this whole process: GO (please)! Will dish out SBs until I run out..

This is why everyone on my team knows who's holding the master at any given time. Yes, having one person own it is old-fashioned and inconvenient. But at least it works. Cloud solutions don't. Yet.

 

Version control is only in issue, in my experience, in teams that aren't accustomed to working together. I have been working with the same guys (to include Directors) for well over a year and we have a pretty solid system in place.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses - Henry Ford
 

I don't really see what the problem is. Some kid prints out a copy for you and you scribble a few edits and he turns it around by the time you get back. Seems to work pretty well. Am I missing something?

 
BanditPanditdropbox or box...get with the times, especially if in a tech group. there's just no excuse to have that shit in a group like that

No cloud solution has (yet) made a decent proposition for how to keep people on my team who don't understand my shit from fucking it up and then saving over it so that my correct version is gone forever, which leads me to keep the masters of all my files saved down locally.

If master versions still exist only locally, these cloud solutions are not cloud solutions.

Now, if I could efficiently review and reject/accept every single change, then we'd be talking.

 

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