Review: Slidewise

Like many of you, I have been continuously frustrated dealing with stray fonts in PowerPoint documents. I found a work round with XML which has saved my bacon on more than one occasion and came in very useful for several you that shared my font pain! However, there’s a new tool in town which might put a stop to all the faff and fuss associated with tracking down fonts in PowerPoint – Slidewise.

A few months after writing my XLM work round blog post, I was alerted to a new add-in for PowerPoint created by the lovely people at Neuxpower. As soon as I heard that Slidewise gives users more control over fonts in PowerPoint, I couldn’t wait to try it out!

Slidewise is a font and media add-in for PowerPoint which gives you a deeper insight into your documents. A recipe list, if you will, breaking down your PowerPoint shaped creation into its constituent ingredients and giving you more control over them, from the flour to the pink sprinkles on top.

Pricing

You can try before you buy with a 14-day fully functional free trial. If you decide to buy, Slidewise is currently available at a reduced early-release price of £18.50 before VAT. Fair warning, this price might not hang around for long!

Using Slidewise

Once downloaded, Slidewise sits between the Font and Paragraph options in your Home tab in PowerPoint. With a click of the mouse, a panel appears on the right hand-side of your workspace with an index of all the content that populates your document. From here you can journey through a list of all the assets present in your deck; images, audio, video, embedded objects/chart data and, most importantly to me, FONTS!

There are a number of life-saving tools baked into this add-in that will save you precious time creating documents and has certainly calmed my nerves when replacing objects and tackling stray fonts and rogue image sizes.

You can double click on an object in the media list, a single image for example, and be taken straight to it in your deck. This is a simple but very pleasing tool which can save you lots of time as, with a quick glance at the media list, you can locate any hefty objects in your content, and be taken straight to it.

The Embedding chart feature reminds you how many Excel worksheets you are actually sharing within your deck and where that content lies. Dropping down the ‘Embedding Chart Data’, this gives you a list of the worksheets that sit within your document and a quick double click takes you to where that data is within your presentation. It’s a handy tool to ensure you aren’t sharing confidential content with clients that you didn’t intend on sharing.

Now for, in my opinion, the pièce de résistance…Fonts! Using Slidewise you can see all the fonts that are utilized in your document.  Yes…even the ones PowerPoint doesn’t tell you about. Shocked?! Very happy?! Oh, so was I! I’ll say that just one more time… even the ones PowerPoint doesn’t list in the ‘Replace font’ option!
WOW. Game changer!

As well as seeing a true list of all the fonts in your deck, you can also see if any are embedded into the document, jump to where they are being used, remove them to reduce file size or … Yes, you guessed it…REPLACE fonts directly within PowerPoint. No XML. No saving out. No faff! You can replace one font or multiple fonts together, saving you time and stress. You can even replace double-byte fonts with standard single-byte fonts. What a gift!

For me, this add-in is invaluable for the font functionality alone. All the other tricks it has up its sleeve are simply the cherry on top!

Slidewise is an easy-to-use add-in which will make your PowerPoint life much simpler. A break from waving my wand and converting files to XML to remove unwanted guests. A welcomed assistant to my daily projects. My new best friend. Pesky fonts’ worst nightmare!
Thank you Slidewise.

One thing worth noting: Slidewise currently doesn’t work with projects saved to an online sharing tool, such as SharePoint. The file must be saved to an offline location, then all the Slidewise tools become available.

Are you using the right fonts in your presentations? Check out our top ten fonts list and why not take your PowerPoint typography up to the next level.