L.3.5.1 Introduction

It is often the case that slides are repurposed from existing presentations to be used in other presentations. In such cases, it is often beneficial for there to be an association, or a pairing, between the original slide and all copied instances of it. In the presence of such a pairing, applications can enable a variety of time-saving features, including the automatic updates of copied slides when the original slide changes. The Slide Synchronization Data part is designed to enable such functionality.

Conceptually, there are four components of this pairing:

an external relationship that refers to where the original slide is stored; a unique identifier for the original slide; a date/time field that indicates when the slide in the current presentation was last updated; and, a date/time field that indicates when the original slide was last updated.

The intent behind these components is to provide a method of finding the original slide (i.e., the combination of the external relationship and the unique identifier) and to provide a trigger that an application can use to detect that the original slide has changed (i.e., differences between the two date/time fields).