What’s new in Slidewise 2.6
READING TIME: 5 MINS
We are really happy to be back working on Slidewise again, and we have a great little update for you today. 🤩 There are 2 shiny new features to play with, and we’ve made some key existing features work a lot better.
The updates fall roughly into 2 groups:
NEW FEATURES
Export original images
Export selected slides as images
WORKS BETTER
Fonts in default shapes and text boxes
Action blocked because presentation needs to be saved
Image Audit
New Features
Export original images
You can already export original unmodified images from the Slidewise index. This makes it easy to select an individual image, or export all of the SVGs in a deck for example. However, if you want to export multiple images from a single slide it was a lot harder, because the images would often be sprinkled throughout the index, forcing you to export them 1 at a time.
With this new release you can now select 1 or more images on a slide, right-click and export their original source graphics in 1 step.
Note: The Slidewise pane needs to be open to enable the menu command as it still needs access to the Slidewise index.
Export selected slides as images
There are already quite a few ways to export a selection of slides as images at a chosen size, some more convenient than others. However, we felt that we could add something a little extra to this by giving the ability to choose your export size based on physical Inches/Centimeters in addition to Pixels. We’ve also integrated it with our Ribbon and right-click menus, to make it super-convenient to use.
Currently you can use this feature to export slides as PNG, JPEG or new PPTX files. If there is demand for other formats, let us know in the comments and we will look into adding these later. We recognise that being able to export selected slides to PDF would be useful too - but there’s already a way to do that from within PowerPoint, which we’ve described in our blog post linked above.
Works Better
Fonts in default shapes and text boxes
If you use either the Set as default shape or Set as default text box options in PowerPoint, all of the properties of the selected shape are saved in a Theme file, including the font. Shapes you create afterwards will have that font associated with them, even if you don’t add any text.
This was causing a customer headaches because having replaced a font using Slidewise, it magically reappeared later when they added a new shape. It turned out that we’d missed these theme files in our sweep for fonts, so we’ve fixed that and they will now be replaced.
Slidewise will also now show you these fonts. You can set a default shape/text box for each Slide Master - so they display in the index alongside the Slide Master they are associated with. You’ll see the words “Default Shape”, or “Default Text Box” at the end of the node as shown below.
Action blocked because presentation needs to be saved
You may have noticed occasionally that Slidewise would pop up a warning telling you that your presentation needs to be saved before it could do what you asked it — like this one:
So far so good, but unfortunately, if you said yes, save my file - Slidewise would save the presentation but then collapse the ribbon losing your place and it did not try to resume the action you asked it to perform.
It wasn’t particularly easy to do but we’ve ‘fixed’ this behaviour. Now if you try to do anything that requires the file to be saved, you can save the file - but Slidewise will keep your place, and also do whatever you asked it to before saving - if it can still be done. If you are trying to export an image that is no longer in the file it can’t do that - but it will politely tell you. 🙂
“This might be the most exciting part of the update for me. It’s not glamorous but I think it makes Slidewise so much friendlier to work with.”
Image Audit
The Image Audit does a deeper scan of your presentation to find the potentially problematic images – including images that are oversized, undersized, corrupted or skewed etc.. However, running this deep scan could take a long time, and initially, it ran every time Slidewise refreshed its index.
To avoid it making Slidewise slow, we separated it from the main index refresh and added a manual on/off switch so that you could choose when to turn on the audit. The drawback is that you needed extra clicks to switch it on, and if you didn’t remember to switch it off - it would still build its index every time you saved/refreshed Slidewise.
To make this better we have now automated it so that when you navigate to the Image Audit - it automatically runs the audit, and when you navigate away it disables the audit to avoid slowing Slidewise down.
Thank you to Troy Chollar for continuing to champion this issue. 🙂 Your most recent query about it on The Presentation Podcast, helped us to a sudden epiphany that there might be a much better way.
— Mike Power
What’s next?
We have already started working on the next major upgrade to Slidewise that we hope to finish in early 2025. This will include a feature to replace colours, new expanded and more easily shareable reports and as many other smaller improvements as we can cram in.
We’d love to know what you think of anything we’ve added in this release, or equally, your wishes for what you’d like us to include in the next big release. Just let us know in the comments below.