preventing PowerPoint presentations from being edited

During trials parties typically exchange PDFs of demonstratives prepared in PowerPoint for openings, witness examinations, and closings. While these PDFs can capture some of the animated steps in a slide deck, and sometimes even include video added to slides, much of the content of the PowerPoint presentation will inevitably be omitted from the PDF version. If you'd like to, or are required to, send out a PowerPoint file with the full functionality of the original, but don't want the recipients to be able to edit the file, OfficeOne has an add-in called Shape Locker that will allow you to lock it down and make it impossible to alter.

See this link: https://officeoneonline.com/shapelocker/shapelocker_download.html

Shape Locker will appear on the Design Tools tab on the PowerPoint ribbon.

If you select the objects on a slide and then click on 'Lock Shapes' you will be prompted to indicate how you want to lock down each selected shape. You can configure the presentation so that shapes cannot be resized, repositioned, or even selected, and so that text can't be edited.

The add-in is not free - a single user license costs $49, but a trial version is available. The trial version lasts for 11 days.

I tried running some vba code to select all of the shapes in a PowerPoint file at once, but this did not allow me to use Shape Locker on all slides automatically. It's necessary to lock the shapes on each slide one by one.

I've tested it out, and confirmed that I could not edit text after running it, or select any object at all on a slide. However it was possible to access the Animation pane in PowerPoint and make changes there.

An iPhone Knows Your Significant Locations

Keep in mind that iPhones use a particular method to track the smartphone's location known as 'significant locations'. This function can be accessed under Privacy and Security in Location Services.

. . . after the list of app specific settings in Location Services you'll find 'System Services' [note the color coded flag of a gray arrow showing that an app has tracked the phone's location in the last 24 hours and a purple arrow when an app has tracked the location very recently.]

Scroll down and you'll see the 'Significant Locations' option.

Apple states that the location data is encrypted, and that it cannot access it itself - (unless it is subpoenaed to produce it??).

The Apple policy linked to under 'Significant Locations' states that it uses the data to track the movements of groups of people and automobile traffic. Note that Apple also reserves the ability to estimate your location based on your IP address.

Retaining highlighting after flattening a PDF

After flattening a PDF, by using the ‘Adobe to PDF’ you may have noticed that highlighting colors can be altered in the resulting PDF.  

 For example, if you have a transcript like this:

. . . and you select ‘Adobe PDF’ to flatten the PDF by writing it to a new PDF file . . .

. . . first look under the Advanced options and see if you have a color profile selected which is something like ‘Working CMYK: US Web Coated (SWOP) v2’ as shown in this example.  It may be set as the default color profile in Acrobat.  It’s used for printouts on high quality paper.

 It will darken the colors like this and make the resulting, flattened PDF harder to read.

. . . to retain the highlighting colors in a flattened PDF, instead select the profile, ‘Working RBG: sRGB IEC61966-2.1’

As the caption in the advanced settings notes, this profile is geared towards the color settings for most monitors. The name is a reference to a document published by the International Electrotechnical Commission which sets a standard for the implementation of RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color models used by electronic displays.   CMYK stands for ‘Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key/Black’ and is a color model designed for hard copies.