Properties of a Presentation in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Presentation properties (metadata) are details about a presentation that include specifics such as titles, author name, subject, and keywords that identify the document. It is important to specify relevant values for the presentation's Properties fields, so that it can be easily organized and identified. Populating the Properties fields also helps you search for slides more efficiently later.

Here are some types of document properties:

i. Standard

Standard properties which are set automatically by the application itself such as: Author, Title, and Subject. You can also specify your own text values for these properties.

ii. Automatically

Automatically updated properties includes both file system properties (File Size, File Date, etc.) and statistics that are maintained for you by the application. These properties cannot be changed. You can use the automatically updated properties to identify or find documents. For example, you can search for all files created after August 3, 2005, or for all files that were last changed yesterday.

iii. Custom

Custom properties are the additional properties for your presentation. You can assign a text, time, or numeric value to custom properties, and you can also assign them the values yes or no. You can choose from a list of suggested names or define your own.

Follow these steps to view and edit current presentation properties in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows:

1. Open any presentation in PowerPoint that has been saved at least once. Access the File menu, and choose the Info option to get to Backstage view, as shown in Figure 1, below. The pane on the right-side displays Properties of the current PowerPoint presentation, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1.
2. 
   Figure 1: Properties pane within Backstage view
2. Within the Properties pane, click the Show All Properties option, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 1, above. This action displays all the properties such as: presentation Size, number of Slides, Hidden Slides, number of Multimedia Clips that the presentation contains, etc., as shown in Figure 2, below.
3. 
   Figure 2: All presentation properties displayed
3. Within the Properties pane, some entries are editable, and some of the others are not editable. To ascertain what you can edit, hover your mouse cursor over any detail of a property. The editable sections will show a cursor; in Figure 3, below, you can see that the Title of the presentation is editable.
4. 
   Figure 3: Presentation Title can be edited
4. Although PowerPoint automatically adds the Author name within the Properties pane, you can change the author's name as required. Additionally, you can add more Authors from your Address book. To do so, click the Search Address Book for Contacts icon placed right next to the Add an author option, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 4, below.
5. 
   Figure 4: Search address book for contacts icon
5. Doing so opens your default Address Book dialog box, as shown in Figure 5, below. Within the dialog box select the contact you want to add as an author and click the To button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 5.
6. 
   Figure 5: Address Book dialog box
6. This action will add the selected contact to Message Recipients, as shown in Figure 6, below. Add as many contacts as you want, and click the OK button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 6.
7. 
   Figure 6: Contact added to Message Recipients
7. Doing so adds the selected contact as an Author within the Properties pane, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 7, below.
8. 
   Figure 7: Selected contact added as an author
8. Click the Properties button within the Properties pane to bring up a drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 8, below. There are two options within the drop-down menu, both of these options are explained in our Advanced Properties tutorial.
9. 
   Figure 8: Properties drop-down menu
9. Save your presentation often.