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What Document Properties are actually used in PowerPoint presentations?

It is possible that the metadata which is available to PowerPoint presentations might be actually be used in real-life presentations.

Therefore, 1,180 PowerPoint presentations were downloaded at random (see methodology), and the metadata extractor Filecats Professional imported the metadata into Microsoft Excel in order to find out what document properties were actually used.

The results are as follows:

Common metadata for Microsoft PowerPoint documents

All of the files included Windows Explorer dates such as Date access, Content created and date modified. Most of the files also included dates from Microsoft Office’s document properties, namely Date last saved and Content created.

However, the Windows Explorer dates are not necessarily the same as the Microsoft Office dates, and in such circumstances the Microsoft Office dates are to be preferred. For a comparison of the dates, please see the article “Windows Explorer and Microsoft Office dates”.

• All the files also include “Total Editing Time”. However, 22% of the files have a Total Editing Time of “00:00:00”. Of the remainder, the minimum is 9 seconds; the median is 21 hours 44 minutes; and the maximum is 1,202 hours.

• 17 out of 18 files include revision number, of which almost all the numbers 1-150 are used.

• 17 out of 18 files also include the statistics, such as word count, slides, hidden slides, notes and multimedia clips. The median number of slides per presentation is 23, 64% of files have notes, 3% have hidden slides, and only 2% have multimedia clips.

• A similar number includes “Presentation format”. Of this number, more than 3 in 4 are set up for “On-screen Show (4:3)” or “On-screen Show”.

• 15 out of 16 files have Title document property, significantly more than in Word and Excel documents. However, 23.6% have a Title of “Slide 1”, and a similar number (21.7%) have a Title of “PowerPoint Presentation”. This 45.3% is divided unequally between .ppt files (38%) and .pptx (50%). This leaves slightly less than 1 in 2 which have genuine Titles.

• Over 9 in 10 files have a “Last saved by”, and just under that number have Authors, Creators and Participants (whilst expressed in the plural, there was always one per file). Over 2 out of 3 files have a different “Last saved by” compared with their Author.

Lesser used Microsoft PowerPoint document properties

• Just under 1 of 2 files have a “Company”, and around 10% have companies should have “Hewlett-Packard”, “Microsoft”, “Home” and “Privat”. This leaves around 40% of presentations which have genuine Company information.

• Around 2 of out of 5 files have a “Template”, most of which relate to the Theme used.

• 1 out of 6 files have a date “Last printed”, reflecting the fact that presentations are less printed than Word documents and spreadsheets. And finally, 1 out of 70 have Tags, and 1 in 150 have Manager metadata.

The analysis has been taken from this Filecats Professional catalog.

What's Next?

This is one of three articles, the others regarding metadata actually used in Word documents, and document properties actually used in spreadsheets.

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If you would like to create your own catalog, and obtain the Microsoft Office document properties as shown above, then try the metadata extractor Filecats Professional (if you like using Excel) or Filecats Metadata (if you don't).

Download a 7-day trial here.