Managing Large Decks

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I have a pretty large deck (about 150 slides) that covers about 8 distinct topics. All of these slides makes swapping the topics around a little bit difficult. Is there a way to create a hirachical structure in a deck so that if I move the subject intro slide, it also moves the other slides associated with it?

How do people organize large decks?

PS: Do you call a ppt file a deck – this might just be terminology from my work.

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I’ve heard people talk about slide decks before – so I don’t think it is specific to your work. (I’m answering using 2007)
I have three ideas about reorganizing a presentation.
One method – would require that there aren’t any graphics on the slides (because they will be lost). In the Outline view use the increase/decrease list level buttons to create a hierarchy that you can reorganize. This would probably work best in the very early stages of writing a presentation.
The second method; use the appearance of the slides as a visual cue to the sections of the presentation. Then in slide sorter view (with the zoom cranked down to the smallest level) you could recognize each section by its’ appearance, select the section and drag them around. I like this idea because I like when different topic areas are formatted (a little bit) differently it lets the audience know when you’ve moved on to a new topic.
The third method is use the Custom Show feature (this is available in 2003 as well).This help page from Microsoft describes how.
Once the Custom show is created you can ignore the actual slide order in the file and simply use the show order.
What I would probably do is create a show for each section. Then I could use the showtime tools to pick which show I wanted to talk about next. Alternately you could create a series of hyperlinks to various shows embedded in the presentation itself.

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