Watch Out When Using Excel Content!
I just read a blog post on Presentation Magazine where they asked several people for their best presentation tips. There are 37 in total and number 25 is from Max McConnell, Division Director of Prompt Communications. Max talks about embedding your excel spreadsheets into PowerPoint and the dangers of just cutting and pasting it. Max suggests the following procedure.Edit->Paste Special and choose ‘Picture (Enhanced Metafile). This places the excel data as a picture. Failing to do this will transfer all the excel support files and you may be giving way too much information away. It reminded me of a a true story.
Be Careful of Excel Data in Your Great PowerPoint Presentation!
During my last corporate stint, we were just in the infancy of commercializing a new technology. We had tweaked the interest of a major global fortune 100 company and they came to visit us to discuss the merits of the technology and to see if we could do some business together. There were just 8 of us in the company at the time and the thought of sitting across the table from this huge mammoth of a company was rather intimidating. It
was a David vs. Goliath affair.
So our meeting began. We showed our corporate presentation and they showed us theirs. Standard boring stuff. I liked their presentation because it had some industry specific graphics that I thought would be nice to have. After their presentation I complimented the speaker and asked if I could have a copy of the PowerPoint. They obliged.
The first day of discussions went by without a hitch. That evening I was going through their presentation and happened to click on one of the charts. Much to my surprise, it was linked to several sheets of excel data. Data that we were not to have access too. It contained much of their marketing data, sales numbers, overall market share and who the main competitors were.
Needless to say the next day of negotiations was a bit of fun. The tables had turned and we were not longer desperate to work out a deal now knowing the other competition and their market position.
I won’t elaborate more however just to say we did okay in the negotiations and we got what we wanted and a whole lot more. To this day they never knew what they gave us. This same scenario happened several times since. We made it a habit to always ask for a copy of their presentation just to see what other information we could find. I had one company unknowingly give me their master spreadsheet of all of their product sales, serial numbers, exact locations of installations, contact names, price, profit margins etc. etc.
We did not use the information in a malicious manner but it was comforting to have this data. It made negotiations a little easier.
Be careful when preparing your presentation using excel data. Paste the tables and charts as a picture only. You will make a great presentation and not get burned.
This is going to be a journey.
Tags: Corporate Presentations, Management, PowerPoint, Presentation Preparation, presentations
Tags: Corporate Presentations, Management, PowerPoint, Presentation Preparation, presentations
December 2nd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
I shall not comment on the ethics.
Operationnally, if you make a pdf of your ppt and distribute only pdfs the problem is solved genuinely, right?
regards
December 2nd, 2009 at 7:45 pm
You must have been dealing with the JV negotiating squad. Anyone with any savvy knows that you only give out hard copies of PPT as a leave behind. Otherwise do as jl does and give them a PDF. Rookies…
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Great post M.J. Unfortunately, too many people forget about this.
Having static images or regular PPT shapes is a must when people want to keep sensitive data for themselves.
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Thanks for your comments everyone.
It is correct that making a PDF will mitigate the risk of giving too much information away. If not converting to a PDF makes one a rookie, then the world is full of rookies. PowerPoint is in the hands of so many employees. These employees make presentations both inside and outside their organization. While many of us know better, equally as many if not more don’t.
However another problem arises. How often do we put our PPT on a memory stick? It is good practice to have a back up presentation with you. What if you leave your memory stick behind some where or it becomes lost. Not only have you lost your presentation back up, you have sensitive company data on there also. My recommendation is to paste the chart or graph as a picture only regardless whether you give away your PPT or a PDF version.
As for the ethics, we stumbled upon this information very innocently and remember we were a company of 8 people with a promising technology. There were a global company of over 75,000 employees. All is fair in love and war. They ended up with a good deal at the end of the negotiations. We ended up with the shirts still on our backs
December 3rd, 2009 at 3:49 pm
This no longer happens in PPT 2007. (Nor will it in 2010 when it’s released next June.)
The default paste behavior for charts in PPT 2007 is to link to the chart. If the presentation is given to someone (a client, a partner, what have you), who does not have access to the place where the Excel spreadsheet lives, then they just see an image of the chart. Colors and stuff can still be changed on it, but the data cannot be viewed or edited.
I’d guess Microsoft got tired of hearing stories like yours. Embedding the entire spreadsheet that way has too much potential to put the presentation author in a really bad position.
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:33 pm
I don’t know about the ethics, but it seems that much of the blame resides with the person who inadvertently provides the information.
I had a case years back where a potential supplier provided a powerPoint presentation with about four slides of data. The data showed the greatness of their advanced titanium alloy. The preso was around 4 MB, pretty large for 4 lousy slides, but as it turned out, it contained three entire Excel workbooks, complete with unpublished data showing the ugliness of their advanced titanium alloy.
I contacted the representative and told him two things: (1) His PowerPoint presentation contained entire workbooks of sensitive material, and (2) No thanks, we don’t want to purchase any of this material.
January 2nd, 2010 at 9:33 am
Hi Jon,
Regarding the ethics, I think that it starts out innocently enough. At least it did in my case. I wanted the specific graphics they used and they were happy to give them to me. The main reason for my post is that much more is often given with the PowerPoint and that is the purpose of telling my story.
I tested this again during another negotiation and again received information I should not have. While many know about the proper way to insert excel graphs into PowerPoint, I think there are equally as many who don’t.
Happy New Year.
January 2nd, 2010 at 11:33 pm
By ethics, I was referring to the ethics of the recipient of sensitive data looking at that data, and perhaps even using that data to make business decisions, before deleting it and notifying the sender.