Slidewise update October 21

We’re really glad to be back working on Slidewise after a break to work on essential NXPowerLite updates. In case you haven’t encountered it before, Slidewise is our PowerPoint add-in that makes checking, cleaning and editing presentations much easier.

We’ve got a pretty clear calendar, so we’re expecting to lay down some significant new features over the coming months. In October, we’ve already released two big updates, featuring the following:

Cloud fonts

Slidewise is now able to detect cloud fonts, so it will no longer report these as missing from your system. It also includes these cloud fonts in the Replace Font dialog. It doesn’t yet indicate which are cloud fonts, but this will be coming in a subsequent release.

More content is now indexed

The Slidewise index now also finds external links, internal links, Ink, and 3dModels.

Preferences

We’ve also added a Preferences dialog to give you 3 options to control how Slidewise behaves.

Slidewise preferences

  1. Slidewise will now install a button on the Home tab as well as creating its own Ribbon group. You can remove this simply in the Preferences by unchecking the “Show Slidewise on the Home tab” option.

  2. Slidewise can now start automatically when you open a presentation, or you can choose to have it only open when you explicitly ask it to.

  3. If you need to re-enable the warning that alerts you when Slidewise needs to close your file to make changes, you can do that with this third option.

User experience improvements

To make Slidewise visually clearer we have removed the “Media” top-level node, removed zero values, and added a count to images, to show when an image has been used more than once.

In “SlideSorter view”, if you double click on a shape in Slidewise, it will now change to “Normal view” and jump to the item, rather than just highlighting the slide.

If you double click on a shape, and it is out of the current view e.g. off the slide, it will now make an attempt to bring the shape into view.

Slide masters and layouts

You’ll see when you open Slidewise that there are now two tab options at the top of the pane - “Presentation” and “Slide Masters”.

New Slidewise tab buttons

When you click on the Slide Masters tab, you’ll see a new index showing all of the masters and layouts in your presentation, and for each layout, which slides are using them. Double-click a slide to jump to it.

Slide master index

We’ve also grouped all of the unused layouts together under each master, so you can quickly see which layouts aren’t in use. Double-click an unused layout to jump to it in the slide master view.

Slidewise showing unused slides

The inspector will always show for the current slide which layout and master it uses.

Slidewise reassign menu option

That will bring up the Reassign Slides dialog where you can quickly change the layout used for multiple slides.

Reassign slides dialog

We hope that even in this early state, the masters and layouts feature proves useful. We have plenty of ideas for how to extend this further, but we need your feedback in order to make it really awesome. Please contact us if you’d like to share your thoughts and ideas - we are listening.

Read about Slidewise, and download your 14-day free trial.

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