Knowing What's Out There is Half the Battle
I was inthe kitchen this afternoon when one of my co-workers asked me if I knew anything about putting music to a PowerPoint slideshow. I had to admit that I didn't, and remarked that she'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who did since it's not something many people need to do.
"Ah," she said, "That's because you're all business focused; but sometimes we need it for things like twenty-firsts etc."
I realised then what she was trying to do - make up a slideshow of photos with a soundtrack. She'd apparently been stuffing around for some time trying to convert MP3s to WAV so that PowerPoint could see them etc.
Fifteen minutes later I gave her a quick demonstration of PhotoStory 3 for Windows. Needless to say she was blown away.
Another satisfied customer, but it goes to show: Half the battle when it comes to getting stuff done on computers is knowing what tools are out there to make your work easier. Those of us who are a little more experienced can keep up to date with the help of RSS feeds and the like. The rest? Well, they ask the resident geek when they see him in the kitchen.
Comments
# Andrew Tobin
18/04/2007 3:19 PM
LOL, this is where I can feel awful because when you asked me about it I had no idea it existed?
It's hard to not be a little business focused when someone comes up and asks a question like that in the workplace from an IT guy.
I wouldn't have immediately thought, "well, what would I do for a 21st?" instead just thought she was talking about a business presentation anyway.
# H
19/04/2007 2:23 AM
Powerpoint should be able to use mp3s. I've done it for the church songs before.
Embed the sound file into the first slide then click on custom animation. Select the sound animation and select start with previous (make sure it's the first animation). Click on Effect options and then select stop playing after 'x' slides.
Piece of cake.
# mabster
19/04/2007 8:16 AM
Thanks for the info, H. Not sure what my co-worker was doing wrong, as she told me that it only supported wave files. Perhaps she has an older version at home.
Regardless, PowerPoint is overkill for a job like this. Have you checked out PhotoStory? It's a few years old now, but it's an amazing little free product.
# Stevo
19/04/2007 9:33 AM
Its funny i attended a 21st only last week that too advantage of Photostory...
Anyway Free being the key word. A good effort from MS
# H
20/04/2007 10:42 AM
Nah, 97 should handle mp3s. Will have a look at photostory. We've had some people in the past want to put up slideshows of photos and we've used powerpoint in the past.
One such presentation had 193 photos. Imagine putting that amount of photos into a powerpoint presentation and then having to resize them so they'd fit. Guess who's job it was.
Anyway, I ended up writing a vba procedure to do it which saved hours of work. I guess this is the advantage with powerpoint for us developers?