Slides for a conference or webinar: what a deck you hand to the organiser can carry to every attendee

Last updated: 26 October 2026

Short answer: the deck you present from is a working file, and the organiser may post the same file for everyone who registered. A talk built from an internal deck can still hold hidden slides for another audience, speaker notes, comments from the people who rehearsed it with you, section names, the path to a linked video and the names in the properties. Keep your speaking copy, make a separate copy to share, clean that one, and send it only once you have checked it.

This page is about the step after the talk is written: handing a .pptx to a conference, a webinar host or an event platform, which may then share it with attendees, post it for download or keep it in an archive. How to remove each item, and what Document Inspector does with it, is in speaker notes, hidden slides and comments in PowerPoint; this page is about deciding what the shared copy should hold. The examples here are typical cases, not reports of real ones.

Where the file goes after you hand it over

A deck sent to an organiser is often opened on a laptop that is not yours, uploaded to a platform, and sent on to attendees, sometimes as the .pptx you sent rather than a PDF. Each of those is a copy you cannot clean later. That is why the shared copy should be made for the widest audience it may reach, not for the organiser alone, and why it is worth asking the organiser in advance whether they will share your file, and in which format.

What a talk deck can carry

What a presentation deck can hold besides the slides the audience saw
What	Where it is	Why it matters once attendees have the file
Slides for another audience	Hidden slides, often from the internal or sales deck the talk was built from	Customer names, prices or results that were never meant for a public talk
What you planned to say	Speaker notes under each slide, pictures in them included	Asides, figures you chose not to show, reminders about the audience
The rehearsal	Comments and replies, with each author's name	Colleagues' names and their remarks on the draft
How the work was split	Section names in the slide list	Names of colleagues or of a client, if sections were used to divide the work
Where the video came from	The path to a linked video or audio file	A user name or a network folder in the path
Who made it	Author and Last Modified By; Title and the custom properties	A colleague's personal name, an internal reference, "draft"

A talk built from an internal deck

A conference talk is often assembled from slides that already exist: the sales deck, a project review, last year's talk. Slides that do not suit the new audience are hidden rather than deleted, in case someone asks. Microsoft's page Hide or show a slide describes this use, slides "that provide different levels of detail on the subject matter, perhaps for different audiences", and says: "A hidden slide remains in the file; it is merely hidden when you run Slide Show view." Everyone who downloads the deck gets the hidden slides too. In the shared copy, unhide each one, and delete every slide the public audience should not have; if you might need a backup slide in the room, keep it in your speaking copy only.

The same applies to what the slides were built on: a chart pasted from an internal report can carry the workbook behind it, covered in charts and embedded Excel in PowerPoint, and the slide master can carry the old template's names, covered in slide masters and templates.

Notes: for you, or for the attendees?

Some speakers want attendees to have their notes as a handout; most notes were written for the speaker. Decide which yours are. If the attendees should have them, read every page of notes as if it were a slide, and look for pictures there too; if not, remove them from the shared copy. Either way, the shared copy is not the one you speak from, so your own notes stay with you.

Comments from the rehearsal, and section names

A talk that colleagues reviewed usually carries their comments, each with its author's name. Delete them in the shared copy, resolved ones included; how, program by program, is in removing comments, ink and annotations.

Section names are easier to miss, because they are not comments and do not appear in the slide show. Microsoft's page Organize your PowerPoint slides into sections suggests: "You can assign each colleague a section to make slide ownership clear during collaboration", and says the names you enter "appear as headers above each section". Anyone who opens the file in PowerPoint sees them in the slide list. Rename or remove the sections in the shared copy if they name people, a client or an internal project.

The video on the slide

Microsoft's page Insert and play a video file from your computer explains the two ways a video goes in: "you can insert an embedded video (the default behavior) or link to a video file stored on your computer", and "A linked video keeps your presentation file smaller, but links can break." On the organiser's laptop, a linked video may not play, and the file still records where the video was on your computer or network. The same page says File › Info shows "a View Links hyperlink" for linked videos, which opens "a dialog box that shows the storage location of any linked files". For a deck that will be shared, delete the linked video and insert it again from your computer, which embeds it by default, or leave it out; then check View Links again. An embedded video is a file of its own inside the deck, and it carries whatever it holds; check it before you embed it.

Whose name is on the file

Microsoft's page Change the author name says PowerPoint "sets this property for new presentations you create, using the setting in PowerPoint Options", and that the User name "also provides the name and initials that are displayed in comments and tracked changes." A deck you started from a colleague's .pptx, including a company "template" that is really a presentation, can keep their name as Author, and Microsoft's Document Inspector page says Office maintains "the name of the person who most recently saved a document". Your name on the title slide is your choice; a colleague's in the properties is not something the attendees need. See removing the author name; the steps there apply to PowerPoint's File › Info too.

A PDF instead of the .pptx

If the organiser accepts a PDF, what goes into it is set by the export options. Microsoft's page Save PowerPoint presentations as PDF files says that, under Options in Windows, "You can choose to include frame slides, hidden slides, comments, ink, non-printing information such as Document properties or Document structure tags, in your PDF by selecting the appropriate options." Under Publish what, choose the slides rather than notes pages, which would put your speaker notes in the PDF. Clear hidden slides, comments, ink and Document properties; Microsoft's page Save or convert to PDF or XPS in Office desktop apps says: "To make the document easier for screen-reading software to read, select Document structure tags for accessibility." Keep that one, and read the alternative text of each picture before you export. Open the PDF's properties afterwards. On a Mac, the PowerPoint PDF page says features such as "saving notes, saving slides as handouts, including hidden slides in the PDF" are not available there. Everything visible on the slides still goes in as it is. More in what Office metadata survives a PDF export; for a video of the talk, see what a PowerPoint PDF or video export carries.

Making the copy you share

Keep the deck you will present from. Save a separate copy with a name for the attendees.
Unhide every hidden slide in the copy, and delete the ones the public audience should not have.
Decide about the notes: read them as slides if they are to be shared, otherwise remove them; delete pictures in the notes by hand if you use Document Inspector, which, its page says, "cannot remove pictures that are added to the Notes section of a presentation."
Delete every comment. Rename or remove the sections.
On Windows, use File › Info › View Links, if it is there, and insert each linked video or audio file again as embedded, or remove it.
On Windows, in File › Info, set the Author (on a Mac, File › Properties) the way you want it, and clear Title and the custom properties if they do not belong in a public copy.
On Windows, run Document Inspector (File › Info › Check for Issues › Inspect Document) on the copy; If you keep the notes for attendees, untick Presentation Notes. Microsoft recommends a copy "because it is not always possible to restore the data that the Document Inspector removes." On a Mac, see Document Inspector on a Mac.
Open the copy once more and look through every slide in Normal view before you send it.

How to check the copy yourself

Make another copy of the shared deck, rename it to .zip and unzip it.
Look at the p:sld element at the start of each file in ppt/slides: show="0" or show="false" marks a hidden slide.
A ppt/notesSlides folder means notes pages remain; the ppt/comments folder holds comments, and ppt/authors.xml or ppt/commentAuthors.xml the names of their authors.
Search ppt/presentation.xml for sectionLst: each section element in it has a name.
Search every .rels file in the package, for example under ppt/slides/_rels, ppt/charts/_rels, ppt/slideLayouts/_rels, ppt/slideMasters/_rels and ppt/notesSlides/_rels, for TargetMode="External": each hit points outside the file, and its Target is the path or address.
docProps/core.xml holds the author and the last person to save it; docProps/custom.xml the custom properties.

What ScrubDrop does

ScrubDrop reads a .pptx in your browser; the file is not uploaded. It lists what it finds: the properties, the comments with their authors, hidden slides, speaker notes, objects outside the slide, links to other files including the path of a linked video, picture metadata, and the other kinds it supports. For free, one file at a time, it removes the properties and the comments. It always leaves out PowerPoint's own record of who edited which slide.

ScrubDrop Pro also removes hidden slides, speaker notes (each notes page as a whole, pictures included), objects outside the slide, links to other files and the metadata in JPEG, PNG, GIF and SVG pictures, such as the camera, GPS position and dates in a photo (other picture formats are listed as not checked), and cleans several decks at once and gives them back as a ZIP. The reference to a linked video is removed with the other links to files. If the presentation is set to show only a range of slides, ScrubDrop asks you to set it to show all slides first, because removing hidden slides would change which ones are shown. It keeps embedded video and audio as they are and does not look inside them, and it keeps section names, which you rename in PowerPoint. It does not decide which slides the attendees should have. It reads the cleaned file again with separate parsers before it offers it; open it and look through it before you send it.

Questions

The organiser only wants a PDF. Do I still need to clean the .pptx?

Only if you send the .pptx too. Microsoft's page lists hidden slides, comments, ink and document properties among the options you select to include in a PDF on Windows. Publish the slides with those cleared, and check what is visible on every slide, because that goes into the PDF as it is.

Can attendees see my hidden backup slides?

Yes, if they get the .pptx. Microsoft's page says a hidden slide remains in the file and is only skipped in Slide Show view. Delete them from the copy you share, and keep them in your speaking copy if you need them in the room.

The organiser wants the .pptx to run on their laptop. What then?

Send the shared copy, not your speaking copy: hidden backup slides and notes stay with you. Insert linked videos again as embedded, because a linked one may not play there and records where it was on your computer, and rename sections that name people.

Sources: the Microsoft pages linked on this page were checked on 26 October 2026. ScrubDrop is not affiliated with Microsoft.

Check the deck before it goes to the organiser, in your browser. Free: one file at a time; every supported kind of hidden data it finds is listed, and properties, comments and tracked changes are removed. Check a file.