PowerPointless?

I agree with one of the ThinkFold people (Participo: PowerPointless?) that PowerPoint or Keynote slidestacks can lead to a lot of useful information being locked away in a pretty inaccessible way. Not taking anything away from his arguments, which are sound, but it’s always seemed to me that Apple or Microsoft could improve things with a fairly obvious change.

How about adding a metadata pane to every slide (not just every presentation), allowing us to search (and eventually, I hope, browse, too) our individual slides, independently of the slidestacks, or presentations, they belong to.

This could alleviate to some degree the “locked away” nature of a slidestack, allowing us to access the information therein as necessary, as well as repurpose individual slides in new slidestacks.