Friday, February 13, 2009

Sharing PowerPoint presentations online

I was asked recently how to share put a PowerPoint presentation on the web.

I have not been terribly successful doing that, so I will explore a few ways and post about them here, with more information coming in the future.

First and easiest, in my opinion, is to save the presentation as a movie ('file', 'save as movie'). I need to learn more about how to tweak the timing and other settings. There is an option to include music (go to 'movie options' in the 'save as movie menu). Then the powerpoint movie can be uploaded to google video or direct to blogger. This creates a self playing slideshow out of the slides.

Another option is Google docs. That fine service now supports PowerPoint files - but only in the .ppt format, not the new .pptx. So the files need to be saved as .ppt.

I don't yet know about all the options. The one I tested is manually advanced slide by slide.

Here is an embeddeded test slideshow I just uploaded through google docs.



Google Docs is a great service for hosting and sharing text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.