SlideShare is the world's best presentation sharing site and the largest community for uploading presentations & slideshows. You can upload your PowerPoint, OpenOffice and Keynote presentations, tag them, embed them into your blog or website, browse others' presentations, and comment on individual slides. We also support common document formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel, OpenOffice, PDF files and text files.

What's more, the transcripts of your files will be indexed by Internet search engines and enhance the search engine ranking of your slideshows and documents.

SlideShare is a great place to share your amazing presentations as well as your documents with others and to find some of the best presentations on the web.
The best part is - it's completely free.

We currently support PowerPoint (ppt, pps, pot) OpenOffice (odp) and Keynote. We also support the PDF format, so if you have PDF presentations, you can upload those as well.

SlideShare also supports document formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel sheets, OpenOffice files and text files.

The maximum allowed file size is 100 MB.
Please note, we don't yet support the new Microsoft Office 2007 file format (.pptx) so these presentations need to be saved as lower versions PowerPoint files or as PDF.

Go right ahead and use SlideShare to share any presentation files you like. The best way to do it is to pick a tag for your conference (like etech07 or web2_07). Tell all the speakers at your conference to upload their presentations to SlideShare, and to tag it with the conference tag. This is a great way to promote your conference, while sharing a little bit of it with the outside world.

The basic account in SlideShare will always be free. In future, we might have a paid account with advanced features but that will not impact the free account.

To know more about SlideShare, contact Jonathan Boutelle (US) or Amit Ranjan(India).

You can go straight ahead and upload your presentation without any help whatsoever. But it might help to know the following, just in case you face a problem.
- your presentation file should not be password protected, otherwise the conversion might fail.
- if your presentation file contains macros, your should remove them first
- if your presentation contains very rare or exotic fonts, they may not be converted perfectly

We feel 100 MB is a reasonable size for most presentations. However if your file size exceeds 100MB, try one of the following
- if the bloat in your presentation file is due to high resolution images or photographs, you can reduce the size or resolution of those images and the file size will get reduced.
- if nothing else is possible, consider breaking up the file into multiples smaller files so that each of them is less than 100 MB and upload to SlideShare.

Not really, we support PowerPoint (ppt and pps formats), OpenOffice (odp format) and PDF equally. well.

For Mac users using Keynote, you should save your presentation in the PDF format and then upload it to SlideShare. You can also save your presentation as a PowerPoint (ppt) and upload it to SlideShare, but we think that exporting from Keynote to PDF gives much better results than exporting to PowerPoint.

If your presentation (in ppt,pps or odp format) after uploading, doesn't quite look right (e.g. fonts look awry or some other problem), you might consider converting it to a pdf, using a pdf writer and then upload.

We don't recommend any particular quality or resolution for the images. But remember that if you use very high resolution images, while the output quality will be great, the time to download the converted files from our servers may increase, and the transition from slide to slide in the SlideShare player will be slower. On the other hand, using very low quality input images may lead to haziness or distortion in the converted slideshow.

Thus the decision on the quality of the images to be used, is a trade off between the desired output quality and the time taken to download an actual slideshow into the embedded player. Higher the quality you want, slower the file download will happen, affecting the overall experience.

Uploading a slideshow is a two step process.
Step 1: The first step is the actual uploading of the PowerPoint/OpenOffice/Keynote/PDF file to our servers. During this upload process, the blue progress bar will keep you informed that the uploading process is going on.
Step 2: The second step is converting the uploaded file to SlideShare's format for sharing it online. Once the file is uploaded successfully, it is placed in the queue for conversion. If there are a lot of slideshows in the queue, then this might take a while. You can move away from the page and come back to check later. Look in the "My Slidespace" page for the converted file. If there was an error in the conversion stage, these files will not show up in the front of your "My Slidespace". You will need to go to the "My Slidespace/Edit All" to find the files that were not successfully converted.

The time taken to upload a presentation file depends on how big your file is, how fast your internet connection is and how busy our servers are. It can take more than a few minutes. Please be patient.

-Upload files as usual. Go to the ?Privacy (who can see it?)? dropdown. By default its set to ?Everyone?. Change the dropdown to All my contacts, Only me or a contact list.
-You can also share previously uploaded slideshows. Just go to the Slideview page, and click on the ?Edit privacy settings? in the middle column, near the red lock icon.

-If you want to share with specific people on SlideShare, then you need to organize them into lists. Go to My Slidespace and click on the Organize contacts into Lists link on the right.
-Now when you go to Edit Slideshow and into the Privacy dropdown, you will see the contact list in the dropdown. Choose it.

You can share privately in several ways
-(a) You can share with all your SlideShare contacts. Anything you share with them will show up on their SlideSpace.
-(b) If you want to share with particular people, you can create lists of contacts. For example, you might have a colleagues list. And a friends list.
-(c) If you want to embed it on another You can restrict viewing on SlideShare to "Only me". Enable the embed code and then embed it on your own website (e.g., intranet).
-(d) You can send a "Random URL" to anyone on the web to share privately. This URL cannot be discovered unless you give it to someone (i.e., it does not show up anywhere).

Yes, you can share on your intranet while keeping it invisible on SlideShare. Go to "Edit" for a slideshow. Make it visible to "Only me". Enable the embed code to embed it anywhere you want. Please note that the embed code can be copied elsewhere so warn your colleagues not to embed it outside your intranet.

Go to Edit for a slidehsow. Make it visible to "Only me". Enable the Secret URL and send to who you want to share with. When you are done sharing, uncheck the "Secret URL". It will no longer work.

It depends on what settings you are using. -Your slideshow is more secure when you don't turn on the embed code. So uncheck the embed code unless you really need it.
-When you give the secret URL to someone, make sure to ask them not to post the URL on a public website.
-The most secure way of sharing is to ask your contact to be on SlideShare and share it with them using a list.

You can change privacy settings by using the Privacy (who can see it?) dropdown. The default is "Everyone". You can restrict it to "Only me" or "Only my contacts" or specific lists of contacts.
Random URL is a URL where the slideshow is visible. But the URL cannot be discovered by accident (it is not linked to anywhere on the site). Only people you give to will have the random URL. (Note, ask them not to pass on the URL if you don't want anyone else to see it)

It's pretty easy. First view the slideshow on SlideShare. On the right of the slideshow player you , you'll see a text box called Embed into your blog, with funny looking code in it. It should look something like this <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="blah blah blah" width="425" height="348"> <param name="movie" value="blah blah blah" /><:/object>
If you take that code and paste it into a blog posting or web site, then you would get a little embedded slideshow there. Here's an example of what it will end up looking like.

Look carefully at the embed code. You will see something like width="425" height="348". This is the default size of the player in pixels. You can change the width and height values to your convenience. Check out this blogpost for details.

Yes, you can. But only if the user who has uploaded the slideshow wants to share the source file. You can see the download link below the slideshare player.

Yes you can; use the 'message user' feature on the user's slidespace. A mail will be sent directly to the user's email account. Check out this blogpost for details.

You can add a user as a contact. They will show up in your contacts page, along with their latest slideshows. Check out this blogpost for details.

Go to My Slidespace>> Contacts>>Edit. Use the search box at the bottom of this page to search for users. Check out this blogpost for details.

Use the 'Save as favorite' icon on the slideview page. It will show up in your favorite slideshows section. While saving as a favorite, you can optionally tag it as well. Check out this blogpost for details.

Transcripts are the text from your presentation. They are shown slide wise at the bottom of the slide view page. Check out this example.

You are probably getting email notifications for pings, comments or favorites. You can modify the permissions for these notifications from your 'Edit Profile' page.

No, if the content of the presentation has to be changed, you will have to make the changes offline and replace (or reload) the presentation file again. However, if you just want to alter the slideshow's title, tags, description etc, you can do that easily without reloading the file.

Log into your account, go to your Slidespace and then to the edit profile page (My Slidespace>>Edit Profile). You can upload your photograph there.

You can mark the slideshow as inappropriate. On the slideview page, there is a red icon 'Mark as inapporpriate' below the slideshow title and description. Use that icon to inform us and we'll take appropriate action. Or you can use the feedback form and write to us directly.

Yes, we support Creative Commons. After you have uploaded a slideshow, you can go to the 'edit your slideshows' page and either keep 'All Rights Reserved' or choose from one of the Creative Commons licenses. To learn more about Creative Commons, check out their website.

You can do both. Either set up a default license in your account profile that gets assigned to all your slideshows. Or you can choose to edit a particular slideshow and assign it a license that is different from your default license.

The license selector (dropdown menu) does not show up when you are uploading the slideshow. Once you have done the uploading, go to the 'Edit slideshow' page and you will find the license dropdown there. This has been done to keep the upload interface simple.

Yes it is. Once you have uploaded your slideshow, go to the 'Edit slideshow' page and from here, you can upload your customized thumbnail.

SlideShare is an international site and we have slideshows in many languages. The language filter assists users is filtering the slideshows by a language of their choice. Right now we are supporting the top 11 international languages (English,Spanish,French,Portuguese,Dutch, German,Japanese,Chinese,Korean,Romanian and Italian). We will support more languages in future. Check out this for details.

No, the language filter only acts on the slideshows and not on the text on the SlideShare site. The site itself will show only English text.

Yes you can; go to My Slidespace>> Edit Profile and change the language as desired.

It is possible that while uploading the file, the user has specified the language incorrectly.

It is also possible that this has been caused inadvertently by us. The language feature was introduced some four months after the launch of SlideShare and at that time, we had identified the language of each slideshow using some computer algorithms. It's possible that the discrepancy has happened at that stage.

Either way, changing the language of the slideshow is dead easy; just go to the 'edit slideshows' page and set it right. Or email the user asking him to correct the discrepancy.

Currently, we do not support audio and videos embedded inside presentations.

Yes, we offer our APIs free for non-commercial use. You can apply for an API key.

SlideShare offers various kinds of RSS feeds-

- you can subscribe to the 'Latest', 'Most Viewed', 'Featured', 'Most Zinged', 'Most Favorited' slideshows using the RSS icon in the bottom footer of each page.
- you can subscribe to the RSS feed for a particular user's slideshows using the RSS icon marked 'Subscribe to user' on the slideview page.
- you can also subscribe to a tag, by clicking on the tag and using the RSS icon in the bottom footer of the tag search page


There are other kinds of feeds as well. Check out the RSS icon in the bottom footer of each page.

Absolutely, SlideShare is designed to leverage search engines and the way they work. The entire content of your slideshow - slide transcripts, slide title, description, tags etc will be indexed by search engines and show up in search results.

Yes, you can comment on the individual slides of a slideshow. Just browse to the particular slide of your slideshow and post your comment there. Check out this blogpost for details.

All you have to do is append the slide number to the URL of the slideshow to have a permalink to that particular slide. For example if the URL to the presentation was

http://www.slideshare.net/AmitRanjan/quick-tour

Then a permanent link to the second slide of that show would be

http://www.slideshare.net/AmitRanjan/quick-tour/2

Not currently, in case your presentation contains slide transitions or animations, they are likely to be lost.

Slidecasting is a new multimedia format from SlideShare - you can play any slidedeck synchronized with an audio file. To create a slidecast, you need to upload slides to SlideShare. Your audio file, however, can be hosted anywhere on the web- any server, file storage, or podcasting service. You link the slides & audio together using our synchronization tool. Now every time you play the Slidecast, the audio is streamed from its location and plays with the slides. And yes, Slidecasting is completely free.

For more FAQs on slidecasting, please see this page

We send the confirmation email straightaway but sometimes it gets caught in the email spam folders. In case you haven't received the mail till 10 minutes after signup, look in the spam/junk folders of your email client. If it's still not there, write to us using the feedback form (mentioning the email ID you used to signup).

Sometimes we have problems with the bulk upload feature. We hope to stamp it out soon. Meanwhile do the following-
- upload once again; the problem may get solved
- else, use the single upload feature to upload your file; this should work fine

If problem is still not resolved, write to us using the feedback form and we'll try to fix it.

This means your file could not be converted to our format. Reasons could be varied
- it's possible our converter is temporarily down, try uploading once again
- if your file is password protected or contains macros, you might get an OOPs; remove them and upload again
- sometimes uploading the pdf version instead of the original ppt/odp file (or vice-versa) helps to overcome the OOPs

If none of the above helped, this could be due to some incompatibility between our converter & your file. Write to us using the feedback form (mentioning your username and the title of the slideshow).

You might not have the Flash player installed on your system. This is needed for viewing the slideshows on SlideShare. Go here to download Flash (Flash is a universal format and more than 99% of all computers have it installed; it is completely safe and you should download it without any hesitation).

If you have IE7 on Windows Vista, there is a known problem installing the Flash player. Go here for the full instructions on what to do.

Because we also use JavaScript to ensure clean cross-browser support for our player, you will also need to have JavaScript enabled on your browser to view the slideshows.

Our blog embed player works with most standard blogging platforms (blogger, wordpress, typepad etc). In case the embed is not working properly, do the following,
- sometimes the entire embed code does not get copied; do the copy/paste once again, this might solve your problem.
- if the slideshow you embedded in your blog gets deleted from SlideShare, the embed will stop working. Go to SlideShare and verify that it has not been removed from there.

This happens sometimes due to incompatibility problems with the uploaded file. Try exporting your presentation to the PDF format (if you have a PDF writer) and then upload again. Or if you started with the PDF itself, try uploading the corresponding powerPoint/openoffice file. If that doesn't help, write to us using the feedback form and we'll try to fix it.

If you are using uncommon (or rare) fonts in your presentation, it's possible they may not be converted perfectly. In case you face this problem, try using system (common) fonts. The problem should go away.

Currently we do not support slide transitions or animations, so if you had them in your presentation, they are likely to be lost.

Currently, SlideShare's output format does not support embedded audio or video, so if you had them in your presentation, they are likely to be lost.

Our conversion process converts images and photographs all right; but if the input quality of the images is low, the output quality may suffer. You should use higher resolution (or better quality images) in your presentation and upload again. Read also this

Files can be downloaded only if the person who uploaded it to SlideShare has allowed this. Look for the 'download link' at the bottom right corner of the slide player on the slideshow page (see this example). If download is not allowed, then you shall see 'download not available' written there (see this example ). In case you need the file badly, you could email the user from his/her slidespace and ask him personally.

Log into your account, go to your slidespace, look for that particular slideshow and click on its 'edit' link. The 'delete' option is at the bottom of the edit page.

The full view (without the pop up) will work only on computers with Windows operating system and having Flash Player 9.23 (or above) in the browser (it is however independent of the browser itself). If your operating system is Windows, you could install the latest flash player here. For Macs and Linux systems, the latest Flash player doesn't support that feature yet, so it will open in a popup.