Microsoft partners looking to add some incremental value to Microsoft Office sales, take heed. Workshare has introduced Workshare Compare for PowerPoint, software that tracks changes to Power Point presentations that have been edited and reviewed by users besides the author.

It's a need that's on the rise. Workshare says that about 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created each day, and are used for more purposes than ever before. Often presentations are sent to others for revisions and review.

But the functionality for tracking such changes has largely been a missing component.

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And tracking these changes is becoming more important as the use of PowerPoint rises in industries such as financial consulting, legal and sales, and PR and marketing, says Matt Brown, vice president of product management at Workshare, founded in 1999 to provide software for document comparisons, often to the legal community. The company is now a Microsoft Gold Partner.  

The client-side software needs to only be installed on the PowerPoint author’s PC. When reviewed documents are returned to the author, the author can see a side-by-side comparison of suggested changes to slides as well as suggested changes for new slides, deleted slides or reordered slides.

“It can be challenging to see who is making the changes to PowerPoint documents,” says Brown, who adds that companies are concerned with the possibility of sending out the incorrect version of the documents.

In addition to providing a comparison view of the suggested changes, Workshare Compare for PowerPoint can generate reports based on those changes, says Brown.

While the software does support embedded objects, it does not identify whether a build has changed. In other words, it can tell the user that a change occurred but not what that change is.

The stand-alone application has a look and feel designed around PowerPoint, says Brown, and can be accessed from within PowerPoint itself.

Workshare has an alliance network of national and regional VARs as well as large account resellers that include Insight and CDW, says Brown.

Pricing is set at $145 per user per year, on a subscription basis, and is available starting this week, via download from the company’s Website, and also through Workshare’s channel partners.