Have you ever needed to create a presentation for several audiences — making minor changes to the presentation for each audience? For example, maybe you need to create a comprehensive product development presentation to deliver to the financial folks, the marketing team, and a co-development group. Essentially the core presentation is the same for all audiences. However, you want to keep several slides pertaining to finances away from the co-development group. You also don't want to share all of the marketing challenges with the financial group. What can you do?

You can create a single comprehensive presentation, save it as several file names, open each presentation and make the changes you need, and resave the individual presentations. Then you can keep track of all these presentations! Is there another way? Yes, there is . . .

PowerPoint allows you to adapt a single presentation to a variety of audiences by creating "custom shows" within the presentation. This saves you the effort of duplicating a whole presentation, saving it as a new file, and modifying it to suit a new audience.

Custom shows are shows within a presentation, created from slides that you group together. You can group slides into as many different custom shows as you like. You name each custom show, and when you deliver the presentation, you just select the desired custom show.

To create a custom show in PowerPoint

Custom shows are contained within one presentation file, but they run independently of each other.

1. Open PowerPoint and create the comprehensive presentation. (This presentation should include all of the slides you want to possibly show)



2. Select Slide Show > Custom Shows. Then click New. The Define Custom Show dialog box appears.






3. In the Slides in presentation box., select the slides you want to include in the custom show. Click Add.



4. You can change the order of the slides as you like. To change the order in which the slides appear in the show, select a slide in the Slides in custom show list, then click the Up or Down arrow as desired.



5. In the Slide show name box, enter a name for the custom show.



6. Click OK. The Custom Shows dialog returns.



7. Click Show to preview the custom show. Click through the slides. You should see only the slides for the custom show.



8. Exit the slide show to return to the default PowerPoint view.

Bonus Tip! To select multiple slides, hold down Ctrl as you select the slide.

To set up and view a custom show in PowerPoint

1. Select Slide Show > Set Up Show.






2. Under Slides, click the Custom Show option. Then, select the custom show you want to show.



3. Click OK.



4. To view the show, click the Slide Show button in the lower left corner of the PowerPoint window.

Bonus Tip! If the Set Up Show command is not available, check to be sure the presentation is not open in Slide Show view in another window.