How to Protect a PowerPoint Presentation from Being Copied

You have a PowerPoint presentation you need to share with others, such as an explanation of unique training materials. But how can you protect it from being copied or modified? Protecting the intellectual property in your PowerPoint slides is actually not that hard.

Method #1. Protect Your Presentation with a Watermark or a Password

If you need to safeguard your PPT presentation and distribute it using a physical device or place it on the web providing a possibility for users to download it, a good way to prevent your project from being stolen is to protect it using iSpring Suite. It’s an eLearning authoring toolkit for PowerPoint that offers a bunch of presentation protection settings.

Download iSpring Suite for free and install it on your computer. Open the presentation you want to keep safe, switch to the iSpring Suite 9 tab, and click Publish.

In the Publish Presentation window, select the My Computer tab and head over to the Protection section.

Publishing a
presentation in iSpring Suite

In the opened window, you can configure the security settings you need.

1. Copyright your PowerPoint slides by adding a watermark

With iSpring Suite, you can watermark your presentation with, for example, your corporate logo or copyright notice like © 2020 John Smith. It’s possible to set the watermark’s transparency and position on the slides. You can also specify a webpage that will open when your viewers click on the watermark. It could be anything from terms of use to your profile page on a social network site.

Protection of PPT slides
with a watermark

2. Set a password

This option is pretty straightforward. You create a password and no one can view your presentation without entering it first.

Protection of PPT slides
with a password

3. Restrict time

You can set a special time period when your audience will be able to view your presentation. For example, you can set up a 2-week interval when your slides will be available.

Prtotectiing PPT slides by
restricting time

When you’re finished with the settings, save any changes and publish the slides. By default, the output presentation is saved on your PC. You can then transfer it to a pen drive or CD and distribute it to your learners or colleagues.

Method #2. Make Your Presentation Read-Only

This method won’t prevent your copyrighted PPT slides from being copied and shared, but it will protect them from being modified. The upside is that to lock a presentation from editing you don’t need any third-party services – you can do this right in PowerPoint by using the Mark as Final option. When a presentation is marked as final, other users can read and view it, but can’t make any alterations.

To lock the slides, click the File tab in PowerPoint and choose the Protect Presentation command in the Info pane. In the drop-down menu, select Mark as Final. That will set your presentation in read-only mode.

Making a
presentation read-only in PowerPoint

Method #3. Restrict Permission to Selected Individuals

You can set the restriction to your readers so they can read the presentation but won’t be able to change, print, or copy the content.

As with the previous method, you can do this right in PowerPoint. Simply go to File → Info → Protect Presentation → Restrict Access.

However, to grant people access, you need to connect to the Rights Management Service (RMS). It is integrated into Microsoft Office and is available for faculty and staff. Ask your IT department to help you to enable RMS for your account.

Note: RMS allows employees to share restricted documents only within their company or campus. It won’t be possible to share your presentation with individuals that are not your colleagues or faculty members.

We hope this article gave you insights on ways that you can protect your PowerPoint presentations. If you know of any alternative ways to safeguard the slides, please share your ideas in the comment section.

Useful Resources on PowerPoint

Are you a PowerPoint lover? If so, here are some other helpful articles for you: