When you’re in the formidable position to give public presentations, you may be approached by people with a request to share your presentation slides. Seriously, that is an honor. Apparently they enjoyed your talk, recognized your skill, and appreciated your efforts.

Now, sharing presentation slides is a very controversial topic for many different reasons. After all, you will provide all the work you’ve put into developing your presentation for free. But what exactly is it that you’re giving away? Your ideas? Your skill? Your time?

Presentations are a work of art. When you share them in an edible format, you are losing control over what you have created. If you don’t want to see your hard work watered down by edits, you should not share your original files. However, you can offer two alternatives. Either share only the figures and images you used in your slides. Or make your presentation slides available in a format that does not allow simple editing.

In other words, if someone wants to edit your ideas in a way you don’t approve of, they have to start from scratch and can only draw inspiration from your template.

Here are 2 ways and several tools to safely share your presentations online.

1. Share Presentation Slides as PDF

You can export your PowerPoint or Word presentations to PDF. The disadvantage of this method is that you will lose all animations. If that is not an issue, try the following tools.

KoolWIRE

The easiest and most universal way is to use an online tool such as KoolWIRE.

Using it is dead simple. Browse for the file on your computer, choose the output format, i.e. PDF, enter your eMail address, hit start and wait for the download link to be delivered to your inbox. When I tried it, it took less than a minute and in less than 5 minutes I had my PDF.

File Savr

Now you will want to share the file. Let’s say you don’t have a website or server of your own. Also, you probably don’t want to eMail a huge file every time someone asks for it. Fortunately, the web has a simple solution in store. There are many free online tools that let you share your files through the web and you don’t even have to sign up for the service.

File Savr is just one of many. You can upload files of up to 10GB, more than enough for a PDF file. Simply select the file you wish to upload. Once uploading has completed, File Savr will display the download page for the file. Save the URL and share it with people interested in your presentation. A CAPTCHA test must be passed before the file can actually be download.

I have previously reviewed 5 Easy Websites to Share Files Online Without Signing Up.

PDF Hammer

If someone would like to use parts of your work, they could prepare a PDF presentation and, using a PDF editor, merge individual presentation slides from different sources.

One free online tool to edit PDFs is PDF Hammer.

Along with KoolWIRE it was reviewed in Aibek’s post about Simplest PDF Apps Ever: Merge PDFs, PDF to DOC, Convert to PDF.

2. Share as Web Presentation

You can upload and share your presentation through an online service. While this preserves the original design of your slides, including animations, single slides can not be extracted and re-used in another medium. If this is what you desire, go ahead and give SlideBoom a try.

SlideBoom

You can use SlideBoom as a guest. However, presentations will only remain online for 7 days. To use SlideBoom to its full potential, you should register. There is a free version, which allows you to upload up to 100 presentations. It supports animations, add-ins, audio, video, groups, graphical annotations and blog or website embedding.

SlideBoom creates a summary page for your presentation, which includes the actual presentation, your notes, a transcript, and optional sharing options. Members can vote on you presentations and download them if the owner has unlocked this option. Below is a demonstration of an embedded presentation.

If you would like to improve your presentation skills, check out my post on 10 Powerpoint Tips for Preparing a Professional Presentation.

Do you feel comfortable with sharing your presentation slides?

Image credits: duchessa

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Tags: file sharing, microsoft powerpoint, pdf, presentations, slideshows, Web Apps