Alas. If it weren’t for the medical requirements, I would pursue this further.
That was beautiful. 
Yeah, that’s often how it is.
If you’re ever interested in greatly increasing the efficiency of this production - basically, improving it in every way including reduction in man-hour efforts - ping me. I’ve weaned quite a few clients and companies off a PP addiction. A half-assed solution that works in many cases is to use the better tool to create the slides, and when someone whines that they have to have PP… embed JPGs of the slides in a PP file. I have a macro for that.
It really is a thoroughly shitty tool that costs more in productivity and presentation quality than any notion of convenience and compatibility is worth.
I didn’t say “expert,” but I also wasn’t clear enough: “specialist” is a very general, entry-level title (in my world, anyway). I was suggesting that you look for someone familiar with medical marketing material, not someone who’s going to want to create the material. My point was that – IMO – your ad should target the skills/knowledge that are the most specialized: experience with marketing materials and medical terminology isn’t as easy to get as PowerPoint is to learn (even the advanced capabilities). So focus on that, but make “PowerPoint expert” a requirement.
I hear ya, but that’s a nonstarter. We’re not weaning Pfizer, Merck, any other client, nor the FDA off of PowerPoint, and neither is anyone else, for the foreseeable future. Believe me.
Also, slides have to be editable to be reviewed, so jpegs are right out.
Listen, I know there are better tools out there with which to build slides, but that is not my concern. Our clients come to us because of our scientific expertise, our understanding of the data, and our ability to properly interpret and accurately present it.
'Kay. Much of the business world runs on such rules about tools and tech, and some make sense and some don’t.
Unfortunately, the ones that don’t seem to be enforced by the biggest players. 
My current clients have used Excel for years, but as a publishing tool (to make their documents come out pretty), not as a data-analysis tool. They don’t even know how to use the autofilter. Since I’m not allowed to let them input the data they need into a spreadsheet and then run some cleanup myself, asking them for decisions only when I cannot make them, I’m going to spend several weeks teaching them how to use a tool which these ladies, all of them with degrees higher than mine, think they can use.
Hell yeah, there is such a thing as an Excel Specialist.
This is a really interesting opportunity. I am an Australian who is a Presentation Specialist (yes, its a job and if you’re not sure you’re a specialist, you’re not!)
I work across a variety of decks, including quick-turnarounds and high-end work. I’ve done some work for Pfizer in London for a year, so I’m familiar with the type of medical presentation that is expected. I’ll get in touch!
I look forward to hearing from you.
…dear kindly jesus…
My own reaction had more K sounds, but yeah 
It took over a month to get them to understand that a programmed form will not let them make spaces bigger or smaller at will. Two of them still don’t grok that field length is a fixed, known quantity and that means they need to chop up some of their walls of text.
There are actually Excel specialists. They are very advanced Excel users able to create an application in Excel that acts as the front-end to an SQL database. So they are really Excel programmers.