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© 2005 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
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There are three priorities for you to consider when tasked with the challenge of sending a presentation to an audience without you being present to deliver it. The most important priority is this:
Can the presentation convey to your audience what you would have said had you been there?
While no amount of digitalia can compare to the brilliance that the flesh can deliver, if you cannot answer at least “yeah, sort of,” to the question above, then stop reading now, all is lost, the party's over, find another day job.
If you have cleared that most important of hurdles, you must weigh the next two priorities:
Can you deliver your presentation in such a way that the message you have conveyed is not lost?
Can you deliver your presentation so that its very look and feel are maintained?
If your priority is simply to preserve the message, then you can also stop reading, but not because all is lost and you have to find a new day job. You can stop because your task is pretty easy: there are a number of ways to deliver the ideas you create in a presentation, and they range from a litany of software and web-based solutions to a simple HTML file that you can post at a website.
But if you are in the other camp, where you need to replicate all aspects of a presentaiton, your challenge is stiffer, especially if you have a media-rich and animation-laden presentation that you want to make available by download. Photos at full fidelity...soft fades...carefully-timed transitions...attached audio...close synchronization of audio to imagery...these are the demands that create gray hair for ambitious PowerPoint producers.
There is a continuum of solutions here, with a trade-off of accuracy and deliverability, and it goes something like this:
Send an AVI, MOV, or WMV file: Just about any person with a computer will be able to open and view it, but it is likely to be wholly unfaithful to your original creation. Even if you were willing to eliminate all compression and create mind-numbingly large files, it is unlikely that those movies would reproduce your photos or your animations with the kind of fidelity you demand.
Send the actual PowerPoint file: One way or the other, your best chance of having your work faithfully reproduced is at the source. No other format will do the work as accurately and as efficiently as native PowerPoint. But which version? Those dramatic fades and simultaneous entrances will land with a thud on the desktops of those who still use PowerPoint 2000 (and that group still numbers in seven, maybe eight figures...yes, tens of millions of corporate users still are at Office 2000).
Send along the new PowerPoint Viewer and package the entire thing into a single file for download. This is the solution that we prefer, as it virtually guarantees that the file will play on any Windows machine in the world (the Mac viewer has not yet been updated). It usually proves to be the most compact file, also: we can usually get a 10-minute montage of music and imagery into a 20MB file. That is certainly outside the realm of dial-up, but astounding compared to the 200MB or so, or the unacceptable level of compression, that would be required (or both) as a generic movie file.
Before we take this solution through its paces, we must point out the one significant caveat with this approach. Because it involves the use of a self-executing, self-extracting archive file, some corporations will disallow it from functioning. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln...
We find that about two to three percent of our visitors are unable to download our files from work, and their typical response gives us cause for comfort: They wait until they get home and do it from there. As the solution is so clean, we place that squarely in the problem-solved category.
This solution works best from PowerPoint 2003, but can be pulled off from 2002, also. PowerPoint 2000 users can use their Pack and Go command to create a collection of files, but a bit of manual work will be needed, as well.
The first step, as always, is for you to be brilliant. And as you are being brilliant, rejoice in the knowledge that you do not have to worry whether your audience has the latest version of PowerPoint. In fact, you do not have to concern yourself with whether they even own the program at all. You will be delivering its playback engine to them.
As you create audio and video, you do not have to fret over whether they are embedded or external and you can proceed without caring which folders you placed them in. If you want to use MIDI files instead of WAV files to keep the size down, go right ahead. As you test your work, if PowerPoint finds it and plays it, that is good enough for you.
Really, the only pre-production issue you need to concern yourself with is faithful typeface replication. If that is important to you, then you must choose typefaces that are embeddable and make sure that you issue the command that embeds them.
Once you have created your presentation file and all of its component parts, your first stop is at the dreadfully-misnamed Package for CD command. You can use this feature for far more than just creating a CD. You can also gather up all of the components of a presentation and place them in a particular folder on your hard drive (and ironically, almost all of us who dole out advice recommend that you do that even when you are burning a CD).
As Figure 1 shows, from the command's Options tab, you will check all three of the important boxes in this dialog to ensure that you include the Viewer program, all linked media, and fonts that must display correctly. Then click Copy to Folder and choose a location. PowerPoint will find or create everything it needs – the presentation file, linked media, font information, the various pieces of the Viewer, and two forms of an auto-player (the autorun.inf file for CD purposes and a simple batch file for everything else).
Figure 2 shows the contents of the folder after the Package command has finished. The first six files belong to the Viewer, followed by a small readme file. Then comes the actual presentation file, after which you will see the three files that control auto-playing. Finally, there are five media clips, all of which are guaranteed to be found by the presentation file, so long as they are all in the same folder.
This last piece of the puzzle has historically been the most vexing with web-based distribution of presentations, because PowerPoint file does not know how to look at a URL for its linked files. For this reason, all audio and movie clips will fail to play if simply posted at a website. The key is to force them to play on the local computer, so keep reading...
There are many paths to success here, and just about all of them involve turning your collection of files into a single compressed archive file – a .zip file. Once you have all of the files in place (see Figure 2), use WinZip or your preferred archive creation tool to create a single archive file.
Now that you have everything contained into a single file, you must convert that file into one that will automatically extract and play the presentation. Our two preferred solutions, both free, are ZipGenius (http://www.zipgenius.it) and FreeExtractor (http://www.disoriented.com). Both of these programs are in business to take a .zip file and turn it into an intelligent .exe file. They both can:
Figure 3 shows FreeExtractor in action. Both programs have the flexibility of giving the user various choices of how and where to extract files; however, for purposes we think that less intervention is better.
Once ZipGenius or FreeExtractor has finished creating the executable file, post it to your website with an appropriate link. We think it is a good idea to include a note acknowledging that you are asking your visitors to download an .exe file, assuring them that the files are completely free of viruses.
When a visitor to your website clicks the link, the following actions take place:
1. The browser begins the download process, typically offering a choice of Open or Save. We recommend visitors choose Open.
2. Once the .exe file is downloaded and opened, the self-extractor begins placing the files in the designated location. Again, our preferred place is the user’s Temp folder.
3. Once the files are copied to their location, the play.bat file is automatically started. This batch file does not just open PowerPoint; it opens the Viewer and instructs the viewer to run the PowerPoint file. This is why it will work irrespective of the presence or absence of any particular version of the program.
Because the files are all in the same location, all media files will play as expected. (Back when you used the Package command, PowerPoint converted all file references in the .ppt file to “pathless,” requiring that PowerPoint merely find the media files in the same folder as the .ppt file.)
You can see an array of examples of this at http://www.altman.com/videos.
If you are authoring with PowerPoint 2002, the Pack and Go command is not capable of including the new Viewer during the file-collection phase of the process. Advanced users can download the current Viewer (http://snipurl.com/pptviewer) and piece together the files needed for the archive (play.bat simply needs the command (@pptview.exe /S <presentation.ppt>). Less ambitious users should check out Sonia Coleman's clever PowerLink Plus solution, available from the Tutorials section of her website, http://www.soniacoleman.com.
To reiterate, if you just need to get a bunch of bullet slides to somebody, you have many options. But when you need to maintain the integrity of a complex multimedia-based presentation, nothing ensures that like the original PowerPoint file. Your quest is to figure out how you can deliver that to your audience.
And you cannot beat the price. If you have already paid for PowerPoint 2003, your out-of-pocket on the rest of the solution is exactly $0...
Copyright 2005, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the Graphics Unleashed Discussion Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.
May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
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