Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with powerpoint

bluetooth headset as PC presenter remote?

nolnar — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:25:40 -0800

bluetooth headset as PC presenter remote? requirements: inexpensive; two input buttons; work with some free software Hi, I need a presenter device for wirelessly changing slides in presentation software (like powerpoint) during presentations.

There are various presenter devices for purchase but the ones available to me are ridiculously overpriced and/or require that a much to large dongle is connected to the PC.

However, my laptop has bluetooth support so I'm looking for a bluetooth headset or other bluetooth device that can be used as a presenter tool, a device that fits this description:

1. inexpensive
2. at least two different input buttons
3. some free PC software/script can tie the input to commands, for example send "next" and "previous" slide commands to the presenter software.

I rule these things out, so please do not reply about them at all:
- bluetooth mouse (too big!)
- bluetooth phone (don't have one so too expensive!)
- regular non-bluetooth presenter devices (off-topic!)

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (Powerpoint)

joannemerriam — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:49:36 -0800

Is there a way to track changes to a document in MS Powerpoint (the way there is in Word)?

Suggestions needed for hilarious Powerpoint Karaoke skit

arrowhead — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:47:25 -0800

I'm compiling some powerpoint slides to be used for a Powerpoint Karaoke at an upcoming BarCamp. Any ideas on what Powerpoint subjects that would generally make a hilarious skit?

Please save my sanity from PowerPoint 2007.

SampleSize — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:04:38 -0800

I do PowerPoint design for a living and -- finally, begrudgingly -- I am switching to PowerPoint 2007. So far, do not like. So, a two-part question: 1. Can anyone suggest a text or video tutorial on moving to PowerPoint 2007 for 2003 power users? 2. I've seen some "make PowerPoint 2007 work like PowerPoint 2003" add-ins. Does anyone have experience/recommendations for any of those? Thanks!

Powerpoint export

Jofus — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 05:17:36 -0800

Powerpoint 2007: I have one large presentation of 200 or so slides in one ppt file. Is there a way I can automagically export each slide as its own ppt file. I'm imaging some manner of macro but the very idea fills me with dread. Does anyone have the mad VB skills they could bring to bear? Failing that, perhaps someone could softly caress my brow and whisper "there, there."

Desperately seeking inspiration

punkfloyd — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:41:17 -0800

I'm in a rut. I need information graphic inspiration. I have been creating PowerPoint presentations for more than a decade and need some fresh inspiration for info graphic design for org charts, tables, and other conceptual images for conservative corporate environment. I like to use PowerPoint shape tools and not import from Illustrator, etc... My PPT template is fine, I just want to see online samples of current best practices for PPT info graphics. I subscribe to Before & After, but they tend to focus on printed pieces.

Powerpoint problems

anonymous78 — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:28:54 -0800

We made a powerpoint presentation on a Mac and sent it to a number of people both in the US and abroad. Most people are reporting difficulties with the formatting - text spilling over onto pictures, etc. What gives? The presentation looked perfect to us and I was under the impression it would be compatible with other versions of Powerpoint - both Mac and PC. (We used version 11.2.) Why is this happening? And more importantly, what can we do to remedy the situation?

How can I pimp my PowerPoint?

colecovizion — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:17:42 -0800

How can I pimp my PowerPoint? I've been around PowerPoint since 1.0. I've been pleased with Powerpoint 2007, but I'm always looking for more ways to add more visual polish. And, by polish, I mean Apple Keynote quality polish (which I use at home but cannot use at work). From my search, all I've found is tacky templates and low res, jagged, inflexible proprietary add-on programs.

What resources/programs are out there that can help me add visual polish to the following areas?

* Shape creation/manipulation. Especially 3d. The closest I've gotten is "Perspector." However, it doesn't give me the ability to do gradients and soft shadows. Powerplugs is appalling.
* Charts (bar, pie) and flow charts (omnigraffle-esqe)
* Diagrams
* Animations
* Text manipulation (a word-art on steroids? 3d would be great!)

I looking for the following attributes:
* Anti-aliasing
* Flexibility to customize colors/soft shadows/transparency/lighting. Gradients are a must
* Ability to customize shapes, curves, bevel, etc.
* High resolution (vector if possible)
* Compatibility with Powerpoint

I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty. Usually, to achieve the look I want I have to do some heavy Photoshopping. I'd rather not go to all this trouble to achieve a clean, elegant, look.

Any Powerpoint vets out there that can give me a few advanced tips? Thanks! :)

open source powerpoint tips?

mecran01 — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:42:08 -0800

I saw a presentation given with Apple's Keynote in which the text that accompanied each slide was not shown on the overhead projector, but was visible on the laptop used by the presenter. How do I do that? And bonus points if you can tell me how to do that with open office, a pdf file, or some other non-keynote piece of software. I am using a macbook with leopard, btw. My google-fu failed me on this one, because I could only think of generic search terms like "reading text below screen keynote". Anyway, thanks for your help.

Automator and PowerPoint

COBRA! — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:00:49 -0800

How can I use Automator to make a PowerPoint presentation run? This is probably easy, but I can't make it work, and I can't google enough pieces of the picture to bring it together. So here goes: how can I set up an Automator workflow to make a PowerPoint presentation open automatically and start scrolling through slides? The more detailed you can be about the workflow, the better, as the whole Automator interface feels really weird and counterintuitive to me.

flash powerpoint

jgballard — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:50:35 -0800

I have a Flash animation (which ends in .app) that I'd like to use in Power Point (it's PP x for Mc) on a MacBook Pro. But I can't seem to find any way to do it. Has anyone had any luck with this, or know of any converters, or know some other way to link to the animation via PowerPoint but not actually as a slide?

Remotely controlled presentation?

zaebiz — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:06:47 -0800

I need to make an oral presentation with slides (preferably PowerPoint) to a small audience (about 15) in a room in a neighboring country. What is the best way to achieve this requiring minimum effort on their end? I was thinking a speaker phone and some software that allows me to remotely control Powerpoint? I have no idea if such software exists but though it was likely. I will be presenting from a fast connection at a company office that is well-equipped. They have the usual gear for people giving presentations in person (projector, fast laptop running Windows) and their connection is usually fast but not always so (its a University).

Help me save my sanity from Powerpoint 2007!

There's No I In Meme — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:33:37 -0800

Powerpoint Filter: How can I set the default font size for a chart axis in powerpoint 2007? Every time I create a chart or hit the 'reset to style' command in Powerpoint 2007, the fonts in the chart reset to a cartoonish 18pt font. Is there any way to change the way to change this behavior to default to the font size I want? I'm tried messing around with the master slides to no avail. Can any Powerpoint gurus save me from insanity?

help.ppt

pilibeen — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:25:17 -0800

How can I create an animated powerpoint w/ audiotrack...all embedded in one file? So I've got all my slides prepared, and I have a script for what I want to say over them. How can I animate the powerpoint, record a sound file synchronized w/ the slides, and package it all in one file?

Would it have to be flash? If so, how?

BTW...I'm actually using OpenOffice Impress.

Study on the science of PowerPoint comprehension?

Gucky — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:33:43 -0800

Can anyone point me to the study in which the main takeaway was, "Don't just read the text off of your powerpoint slides because it hurts audience comprehension"? I remember reading a study about a year ago that talked about the way people comprehend information. Thre was a lot about multisensory, but there was a section specifically in regard to powerpoint presentations. The implication was that people who just write out their talking notes on slides were shooting themselves in the foot.

Doing a google search for it now brings up a lot of opinion pieces, powerpoint how-tos, etc. and I can't seem to wade through it all to find this piece.

Anyone remember it or have better google-fu than I?

How do I create PowerPoint slides using .NET?

mkultra — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 09:42:48 -0800

How do I create PowerPoint slides using .NET? I'd like to output the results of an XSLT transformation to a PPT slide using a template. I know you can basically install Office on your server and use automation, but that seems like a scalability problem and I'm unclear how the licensing for that works. Doesn't MS just provide a server-side framework for this? Is there a cheaper/simpler alternative to Aspose Slides?

I'm using .NET 2.0/C#.

How to shrink my presentation?

arabelladragon — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:29:13 -0800

What is the most elegant solution (.ppt, .key, other) for shrinking my presentations to less than 5 mb on a mac? I am using Leopard. I have PowerPoint 2004, Keynote 08, and neooffice installed. My presentations are photo-heavy and the last chapter came in at 22 MB. Every single photo doubled in size simply by being put on a slide. I resized all photos with a combination of resizr and snipshot (firefox plugins) and managed to get it down to *just* under my school's per-file upload limit of 5MB but it took another two hours of work. I did save as low quality but it only saved me about half a MB. MacOffice doesn't have the option to right-click and resize a photo the way Office for Windows does.

Here are my constraints:

Image heavy, but the images don't need to be poster quality. I'm taking images off web pages (not hot-linked) and from textbooks.
Students need to be able to download and print presentations - school limit is 5mb.
I've been spending 6-8 hours writing each chapter's presentation but this is untenable. The solution needs not to be time consuming.
Converting to pdf or html is not working because that doesn't give students the option to print multiple slides to a page. They have printing limits and printing six slides to a page keeps them safe.
I don't need special fonts, animations, or templates.

The problem as I see it are the OLEs. I'm not a computer person, so here's the stupid question - is there any presentation software that doesn't make oles?

Failing that, I see these solutions. Please help me figure out what is the most simple solution. I'm willing to spend a little money but not more than $150 or so.

1) Buy Mac Office 2008 (to be released tomorrow). Perhaps it will have a better image compression system than mac office 2004.

2) Download image resizing software and run every image through it. I'm running 80+ images per presentation, so would prefer not to do that.

3) Not use images. The whole point of this thing was to show maps and pictures of the things we talk about. It's a requirement to look at cute fuzzy animals in my field.

4) Split ppts into multiple pieces. The last chapter would have been uploaded in 6 chunks.

5) Upload to personal (no quota) webspace, give students the link. Some of them may still run on dialup, so this might be unreasonable.

6) Put Impatica on office (windows) computer. This requires me to go into the office to resize before uploading. It messes up my workflow and I still have to figure out how to get 20mb from the mac to the office computer.

6) None of the above...(fill in the blank)

Thanks in advance.

Can you recommend examples of presentations using Keynote?

jouke — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 06:07:26 -0800

Can you recommend examples of presentations using Keynote? There are 2 sides to my question:
1. I'm looking for Keynote presentations that show me the possibilities of Keynote.
2. I'm looking for presentations (in Keynote or Powerpoint) that show an alternative to the much maligned bullet point format.

Do I need an RF mouse?

royalchinook — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:26:03 -0800

I want to be able to click through some Powerpoint slides in a really large room when my computer is at the other end of it (about 100 ft away). There are no physical boundaries in the way (it's in direct sight). Do I need an RF mouse for this? If so, does anyone have recommendations of good ones to buy? and where? It doesn't need to be overly fancy, probably a click and maybe a RMB click would be sufficient...

How do I output three different images on three different projectors simultaneously using as few computers as possible?

Becko — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:20:54 -0800

I'm looking for a way to output three different images on three different projectors simultaneously using as few computers connected to them as possible. Here's the background: my boyfriend's father runs a community theatre and has asked him to figure out how to set up a system for projecting images for an upcoming play. The theater is a thrust so there would be a projector for the left, center, and right sections. There is a small booth behind the left section that houses the light and sound boards.

For whatever reason, his father would like to be able to project different media on each of the projectors, but would like to do it without having three different computers up in the small booth. As far as we can see, there isn't a way to set up a PowerPoint or a Keynote presentation for multiple displays. My boyfriend has an idea where the three projectors span one desktop and the "slides" are just really big (long) images that span the three displays. I'm not sure if it will work, however, as I can't imagine a presentation program spanning three displays.

For what its worth the theatre has a few PCs available to them, but my boyfriend would be willing to give up his iMac for the show if there is a solution for the Mac. If there is equipment that is required to make this happen, I'm fairly certain it can be purchased.

Oh, and having the setup be easy to control is also a concern as I cannot guarantee the technical aptitude of the operator for the duration of the show.

How do I make LaTeX PDF presentations that don't look like cheap PowerPoint?

Anything — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:00:19 -0800

How do I make LaTeX PDF presentations that don't look like cheap PowerPoint? I have just begun studying the basics of LaTeX. There seem to be many good docs and packages for creating nice no-nonsense layouts for papers, but I would also like to use LaTeX for on-screen presentations. The problem is that all the presentation packages I've looked at (beamer, prosper, pdfscreen) seem to be founded on the idea that presentations need to have these fancy colorful blocks and bubbles that serve no functional purpose. What I want is a presentation that looks just as simple as any academic paper, but with a layout that's designed for a big screen in front of an audience. How do I do this?

Help me find some funny vids!

snsranch — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 17:57:20 -0800

I need gag vids. The kind that start all sweet and innocent and then the monster jumps out and stuff like that. Another is the kind in which your computer is "taking a picture" of you but the picture is actually of a monkey. Please see... My kid's science teacher has started a war with us. Help my boys and I fill up an arsenal so we can kick his butt!!

(And please no sex. I'd love to hit him with the goatse bomb, but it's just not right in this situation.)

Thanks in advance!

Converting PowerPoint to video

XQUZYPHYR — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 16:46:46 -0800

I need to convert a PowerPoint slideshow into a video file that can then be uploaded to YouTube. Is there any freeware (NOT shareware/trial) program that can help me convert a PowerPoint slideshow to AVI/MPEG/MOV? Don't care how complicated or how many steps involved; just need to not have to pay for it.

Come on, Powerpoint. Help me fade in and out of videos.

jimmyhutch — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 23:18:43 -0800

Can I use Powerpoint like a video cue playback system for a theatrical performance? I am trying to manipulate a WMV file in Powerpoint for playback in a theatrical production. I have several videos that I need to fade into and then out of at a moment's call - think lighting cue-type playback. Am I dreaming with this? I thought my Google-Fu was pretty strong, but I can't find anything good on doing this correctly.

I've tried all of the animations, placing them before the video, having the video play with previous, etc. Nothing. Is there a trick to this? I have a black slide before and after the video too, that didn't make a bit of difference.

Is it possible to fade into a video in Powerpoint, and then fade OUT of the video on a spacebar press? More importantly, is there a program that might be better than Powerpoint and still be freeware (or relatively inexpensive) that would be more efficient at what I need to do?

The only other thing I can think of is to make the videos fade in and out in Premier, and then get the timing EXACTLY right. This kinda defeats the purpose of having a playback system that can artistically fade in and out of a video in case lines are skipped or rushed.

Thanks in advance, as always.

Need some music for an awards presentation

eightball — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 12:11:41 -0800

Looking for suggestions for music to be played during a powerpoint awards presentation. The presentation is just a bunch of slides showing the salespeople who excelled. We’re looking for a good song or music to play along with it. Something upbeat. It should be easily available (itunes). It can be a famous song, or just some triumphant sounding orchestra music. I was thinking of the music they play at the Oscars when someone wins and they’re making their way to the stage, but I have no idea how to find that.

Suggestions?