If you build training from PowerPoint, you already know about the part of the job nobody puts in the project plan.
You get the 140-slide master deck and have to split it into modules. You export the narration script for review, somebody changes half of it, and now you’re copying those changes back into speaker notes one slide at a time. A product name changes and suddenly you’re hunting through slides, notes, masters, and layouts trying to make sure you got all 47 instances of it.
I’ve been doing L&D for more than 30 years. At some point I got tired of babysitting VBA macros, writing little scripts, and doing the same tedious PowerPoint cleanup over and over.
So I built Deck Bench.
If the name sounds new, it is. Deck Bench was formerly VoxPrep. The new name fits what the app has become a lot better: it’s basically a workbench for all the annoying stuff that happens to a PowerPoint deck before it’s ready for narration, development, review, or handoff.
Speaker notes out. Speaker notes back in.
This is one of my favorite features.
PowerPoint technically lets you export speaker notes, but anyone who has tried doing that with a large deck knows how much fun that can be.
Deck Bench exports your speaker notes into a clean Word document that can actually be used as a narration script. Send it to an SME, editor, legal, whoever needs to review it. When they’re done, import it back into Deck Bench.
Before anything gets written to your presentation, Deck Bench shows you what changed so you can review it first. Then it puts the edited notes back onto the correct slides. No opening two documents side by side and spending an afternoon playing copy/paste roulette. It can also export notes as Markdown or plain text when Word isn’t what you need.
Split a master deck by PowerPoint sections
This one came directly from my own workflow. We typically build one master deck, and use PowerPoint sections for the individual modules. Eventually those sections need to become separate PowerPoint files for video creation. Doing it manually isn’t difficult. It’s just tedious.
Deck Bench reads the sections and creates a separate .pptx for each one, using the section name for the filename while keeping the slides, formatting, animations, and media intact.
A job that has taken me a couple of hours by hand can take about 30 seconds.
Find and replace without hunting through the deck
PowerPoint’s normal Find and Replace is fine until the thing you need to change isn’t sitting conveniently inside a normal slide text box. Deck Bench can search across:
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slide text
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speaker notes
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slide masters
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slide layouts
You can preview the changes before making them, use case-sensitive matching when you need it, and use regular expressions if you’re feeling adventurous. It will also flag SmartArt so you know there’s text hiding somewhere Deck Bench shouldn’t silently mess with.
Audio in, audio out
If you work with narrated PowerPoint files, Deck Bench can export embedded audio using slide-based filenames. That means you can take the files into Audition, Audacity, or whatever audio editor you prefer, clean them up, strip the old audio from the presentation, and import the new files back onto the correct slides.
Clean up somebody else’s PowerPoint
We all get those decks. Six fonts. Four slightly different versions of the corporate blue. Animations flying in from seven directions because someone discovered the Animations tab.
Deck Bench includes a few tools for dealing with this too.
You can strip animations, inventory the fonts used throughout a presentation, normalize fonts, do basic color normalization, and strip embedded audio
No subscription. No cloud. No account.
Deck Bench runs on your Windows PC and works directly with your PowerPoint files.
Your presentations don’t get uploaded anywhere. There’s no account to create, no service to log into, and no monthly subscription. Deck Bench is $49. Buy it once and it’s yours.
There are some excellent PowerPoint add-ins out there, including tools that do things Deck Bench doesn’t. Deck Bench isn’t trying to replace all of them.
I built it to solve a very specific problem:
There are a bunch of repetitive PowerPoint chores that take five minutes here, twenty minutes there, and occasionally an entire afternoon. Those minutes add up.
I’d rather press a button.
$39. Once. Get Deck Bench here: https://donburnside.gumroad.com/l/deck-bench