Has this ever happened to you? With very little notice an opportunity to present to an important potential customer drops in your lap, and you’re under the gun to pull together a PowerPoint presentation fast – before the opportunity evaporates. Frantically you search through your personal presentations database and feverishly email everyone in your organization for any slides they have that might help you exploit the opportunity. So, instead of diligently planning the presentation, practicing your opening and honing your delivery, you’re pushing your blood pressure to the boiling point just to piece the thing together before you have to stand in front of the senior-level decision-maker the next morning.

It’s just a fact of life in today’s business environment and nothing can be done about it, right? Actually – no. Just ask Pete McChrystal, president of Accent Graphics, and he’ll tell you about PowerSearch, the company’s software solution to your last-minute presenting challenges.

Put simply, PowerSearch is a Windows-friendly plug-in that allows users to scan PowerPoint files across a desktop, network or server drive to find any slides that include your keyword in the speaker notes, titles, bullets or text on the slide itself. The key difference between a traditional Windows search and PowerSearch is that Windows only brings up entire presentations, when all you may need are individual slides.

“So, say I’ve got an opportunity to present to a pretty large customer tomorrow afternoon via Web conference and I’m trying to pull together a presentation on some new products we’re developing,” McChrystal says. “I haven’t had time, nor have any of my colleagues, to pull any of this stuff together so I want to reach out quickly across my company’s network and see what’s available. I could do that manually – start by asking people or emailing saying: Hey, you got anything on this or that? Then Bill in marketing says: Yeah, I think I do, and he spends a half an hour looking through his presentation database. Now it’s not just your time that’s being expended on this effort – Bill’s working on it, too.

“But if I’ve got PowerSearch, I can type in key words or phrases that pertain to the particular product or service that I want to talk about and it will return individual slides on that topic. So now I get a hold of not only the slides I know I have or that I’ve lost track of, but also the information that I may not have known existed. And I don’t have to call Bill or anyone else.”

Bottom line, McChrystal says, is PowerSearch dramatically reduces time spent gathering and developing content, and allows you to spend more time on quality control and refining the critical points of the presentation. And you’re more effective when you do deliver that critical presentation. The health benefits from reduced blood pressure are just an added bonus. For more information call 1-800-771-6011 or visit the company online at www.accent-graphics.net.