Find your slides with slideboxx! Interview with Zinali CEO Charles Wolfus

Zinali LLC’s slideboxx is a program that helps you find your slides.

For the past few years, Charles Wolfus has been co-founder and CEO of Zinali, LLC, a San Francisco-based company dedicated to improving PowerPoint search. For almost a decade, Charles Wolfus has worked closely with scientists, marketing staff, and executives finding ways to increase efficiency and optimize IT systems. I asked Charles some questions about Zinali’s product, slideboxx.

Q: from EllenFinkelstein.com Why is slideboxx unique as a way to manage slides?

A: There are many features that make slideboxx a unique PowerPoint presentation management tool; here are a few examples:

• slideboxx automatically finds and indexes your slides:  Do you really want to spend time organizing and actively managing your presentations?  We believe you have better things to do, so slideboxx does that for you.  It builds your PowerPoint slide library in the background and periodically checks to see if files have been created or modified, automatically updating the library with these files.
• Thumbnails instead of files: Because slides (especially the good ones) are like pictures people recognize them instantly as images. So slideboxx presents search results as thumbnails of individual slides, rather than pointers to files containing the relevant slides. Faster recognition means faster PowerPoint search, and quickly found slides.
• Build presentations fast: Once you find the slides you want, slideboxx rapidly assembles new presentations from them.  It takes care of all the copy-pasting; again letting you get on to the important stuff.
• Hide redundant slides with slide clustering:  If you’re like me, you have 10, 20, or more versions of the same slide. Looking through them all is slow and cumbersome. The redundant slides also get in the way of seeing the slides you need. With our proprietary Slide Clustering technology you can hide derivatives, quickly jumping to the right slide.
• Group slides with slide tagging: We also solved the problem of grouping slides (from different presentations) and customizing search.  With Slide Tagging you can label slides with custom searchable text so you can easily define special sets of slides or ensure particular slides show up in a search.

For more on what makes slideboxx unique, check out our PowerPoint slide library features page.

Q: When you search for a keyword, where is slideboxx actually looking? In the file, for the file name? Anything else?

A: slideboxx finds your keywords in slide contents, notes, and filenames.  It also searches any tags you’ve created for the slide.

Q:  Who can make best use of slideboxx? Can you provide a sample scenario? Or even a true-life example?

A: Many of our customers are scientists who use PowerPoint to explain their research.  Their presentations often require previously created slides to explain the history of their work.  They rely on slideboxx to quickly find the right version of those slides and use them to build new presentations.  Many of these scientists have thousands of slides in their slideboxx library; some have many more.

One scientist recently contacted me about his excitement that slideboxx found long forgotten and lost slides on his computer.  He was also surprised when slideboxx showed he has almost 50,000 slides!  This is a common experience among slideboxx customers.

We also see marketing teams using slideboxx heavily.  Typically, they have a smaller set of authorized slides they customize and retain for each lead.  The marketing folks like to re-use those versions with similar leads, instead of reworking the authorized slides from scratch.  Using, slide clustering and slide tagging they can easily handle all the slide versions and keep track of specific key versions of slides.

But, really anyone who needs to find and/or re-use their PowerPoint slides will benefit.  You can see for yourself in our 2-minute demo.

Q: How much does slideboxx cost, what kind of guarantee is there, and what kind of support does the company provide?

A: You can download a 30-day evaluation of slideboxx for FREE.

A single-user perpetual license of slideboxx 2.0 is $119 and entitles you to all version 2.x software updates and email support.

When you need help, your request comes directly to us, the developer.  We don’t outsource to a team reading from a script, so you always know you’re going to get a responsive, expert, and helpful answer.

In addition to great e-mail support, you also get a lifetime money back guarantee.  We will refund your purchase price at anytime if you are not completely satisfied with slideboxx.

By the way, Ellen, in June readers of PowerPoint Tips can get $30 off by using this PowerPointTips discount link!

So to sum it up: try it for free, get it for cheap, enjoy responsive expert support, and if you’re not satisfied get your money back.