The solution? Create an interactive and navigable presentation that allows easily jumping around, or even skipping non relevant sections of the presentation. An added bonus is that by doing this it allows for a standardized presentation that can be used by many people and doesn't have to be edited in a very uncomfortable plane seat jet while the person in front of you keeps adjusting their seat.
Other presentation applications do allow for hyper linking to other slides, but often they are cumbersome and not easy to link back to where you just came from. SlideRocket is by far the best presentation application for basically creating a presentation that bests mimics a web site.
To accomplish this you will need to build standardized buttons that are global across all slides and maybe include an icon at the right top that acts as a HOME button that goes to the first slide in the event the presenter does lose their place. For any bullet point within a slide that has additional content, create an easy button on that additional content slide to get back to the subject section of the presentation.
I migrated a sales team to this approach two years ago. This approach gave them the flexibility to easily cover any subject within one or two clicks of an icon versus having to scroll forward or back which we all know is very cumbersome and ends up being more confusing to the audience. This also made the Marketing and Graphic Department WAY more efficient and stand out from every other vendor as all the content is standardized and people are not messing up the aspect ratios of graphics because they don't need to ever modify the presentation. The Corporate office can maintain the presentation and keep the branding consistent and let the people out in the field be free from one more daunting task.
The workflow that I found best was as follows:
1. Interview the persons actually involved in the process. Your Marketing Director may have a different understanding of how things are being presented than what is actually going on out in the field (I found this out firsthand). Get a consensus from every one about the goal of the presentation and how it will work best for the presenters while also delivering the message desired by the company.
2. Do a rough sketch of the interface and how it should actually work when being presented. Once everyone agrees on the layout the fun begins, content creation.
3. Once you have your icons, graphics, and master template created start creating all the various slides you will need. It is important to name each slide specifically as SlideRocket links to the name of the slide when creating the hyperlink. I created all the pages without the navigation icons initially because it is easier to create them on one slide and then paste them on to all the rest of the slides. Make sure to hyperlink the icons before pasting them onto the rest of your slides.
4. The resulting presentation should have consistent navigation icons across all slides. This will make it much more easy to train your presenters as well.
Below is an example of one of the slides that were contained within the presentation I created. In all their were a total of about 65 slides within the whole presentation, however there are only 10 main subject slides. I also made it work in a normal "click slide" to go to the next subject slide for those that wanted to stick to the old fashion way.
