We are all aware of the advantages of reusing instead of replacing; it could be refurbishing older PCs for others to use, or recycling the office waste paper. Every one of us wants to make a valuable contribution to caring for the environment.

We are now more aware of waste - whether it is waste of resources or a waste of time and energy, and this has impacted on how we source and create anything from packaging to PowerPoints. It's no longer only the measurable resources such as heating and water that are making us stop and think - the concern about wasting time and energy is also a priority in any work environment.

Think about how many PowerPoints you use in your day to day business. You spend time and effort planning your presentations, creating your slides, and ensuring up-to-date logos and graphics are in place. Isn't it a waste of time and energy if our colleagues have to start from scratch with a similar themed presentation, or if they have to resource all of the images you had already cleared for use? If you use PowerPoint 2010, you can help illuminate waste - and not at a pace that feels as if you are emptying a bath with a teaspoon on the road to a greener workplace.

With Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2010, you can add one or more slides to your presentation from another, without having to open the other file. It's quite simple to add slides from a file that is located on your computer or on a shared network. Simply open the PowerPoint presentation that you want to add a slide to. In the pane that contains the Outline and Slides tabs, click Slides, and then click where you want to add a slide.

You can share and reuse individual PowerPoint slides by storing them in a Slide Library on a server running Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. You, or any colleagues that have access to the Slide Library, can add slides to the Slide Library, insert slides from the Slide Library into a presentation, make changes to the slides in the Slide Library, track changes that have been made to a slide, and locate the latest version of a slide.

By using Slide Libraries, you can create a central location for saving, storing, and sharing slides. When you publish a slide to a slide library, you make it available to be reused in any presentation by anyone who can access the Slide Library.

You can also receive updates to a presentation slide that was inserted from a Slide Library, whenever someone makes changes to the original slide. Each time that you open a presentation that contains that slide, PowerPoint notifies you if the slide has been updated and gives you the opportunity to ignore the update, append a new slide to the outdated slide, or replace the outdated slide with the updated one.

When you change an existing slide in a Slide Library, SharePoint Server 2010 automatically time stamps and checks the file out to you, and then time stamps and checks it back in when you are finished. SharePoint Server has a versioning capability that you can use to track the history of all changes made to a slide. To locate the most recent version of a slide in a Slide Library, simply filter and sort in the Slide Library list.

Remember, in order that you can store, share and reuse slides in a Slide Library, your computer must be running Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 or PowerPoint 2010, and it must be connected to a server running Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.