Most people amass a huge library of PowerPoint and Keynote slides on their computers. File search as a tool to find presentations is collapsing under the load, and searching for a specific slide inside a presentation is impossible. Most people are now using their email program as a document archive ("where is that deck I sent Sally last week?"). 

BitLasso's Reveal is a new program that aims to solve this issue. After installation it builds a database of all your slides and makes them searchable by keywords. The first try is very impressive, you use a specific topic that you still remember from a long time ago, and pop: there are the slides!

Slides are grouped together if they are similar (with yellow highlighting the differences), you can group them by date, by title. It all works brilliantly.

As a graphic design nitpicker, I noticed that fonts are not rendered correctly. But, remember this is a search tool, not a presentation application.

For the average user, this tool works great. For me, a professional presentation designer who has an incredibly large slide library with presentation for many, many, clients there is still a problem. Common business search terms will return so many slides that it is still hard to find the one you need. This is not a problem of the software though, more a result of my profession.

One suggestion could be to allow the search results to be grouped by some sort of directory, or limit the search inside a specific directory, since most users will have a basic level of organization by project on their hard drive to focus the search.

A second concern for power users is the size of the database. Mine quickly ran in the gigabytes after 15 minutes of indexing. Again, I suspect most regular people won't have this problem, and computers by now should be able to handle pretty large files as long as there is sufficient hard drive space available.

All in all, a product worth while checking out. A free trial allows you do 30 searches (give the database indexing some time before you spend them), and the full version of the product costs $49. The software only works on Mac at the moment.