There must be an existing solution for this, if not, feel free to steal my problem and launch a startup. I'll be your first customer. I think the solution is just a source code repository, but for slides, not code.
Problem:

• Several people
• Several decks
• Several project/feature schedules

This is resulting in a lot of churn, and error:

Multiple versions of a deck exist because User A will fork a version of the deck from the current draft to make changes to some slides. While forked User B makes changes to the draft version. When User A then merges in their changes - copying in the few slides they changed, one of which over-writes User B's changes.

What I think I want is that individual slides could be tagged with a release date or version release number - e.g. a slide . When a user is checking in a slide, and if other users have checked in changes that are not in that slide, the the user is alerted and needs to merge these changes.
Making this messy is that a change can be small but important minor UI corrections or speaker note changes.

we do have MS Teams in use - I've not looked to see if that can provide a "source slide repository", or if we could leverage it in some way.

Thoughts? Or am I insane? (The latter I also know the answer to is yes)

Rather than sending/replicating/merging slide files, how about using an online slide/document service so that everyone is working with the ‘only’ version of the slides?

View online, edit online, share online. Nobody has their ‘own’ version, just the online shared resource.

I'm all ears, and recommendations?
Fortunately we have moved beyond the sending by using OneDrive - which is great when working. It is just the replicating and merging.

By versions, I am referring to versions of the product not the slides, but the slides reflect the product. And because of agile, lots of releases! So a slide (might be updated slide or a net new slide) with details about a future release will exist in advance, but should not be published until date X or release Y.

Oh, what about when a slide is common to multiple decks? E.g. a big deck and a small deck. It would be nice if updating the master trickled down to the dependent decks.

I believe Office 365 (with all its subscription headaches) is made for this.

Indeed, as jmwking suggested, there are online collaboration features for PowerPoint slides already existing, but they may require that you use the Microsoft online services for that. Instructional page on how to use the features is located here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/offi...be-89cf2892a34d

Of course, if some users fork off their own version and edit it locally, you still have the same problem, but at that point, it becomes their problem rather than yours.

Thx K447, jmwking, and tfabris
You've given me some pointers, plus let me thing through things