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Home | Products | PowerPoint | Add-ins
Cumulus Office Suite
reviewed by Geetesh Bajaj, August 26th 2003
...Continued from Page 1
PowerPoint Integration
The Add-in
Conclusion
PowerPoint Integration
The Cumulus Office Suite includes a specific PowerPoint filter
in addition to the Compound Document filter - this filter creates
better thumbnails and previews of presentation slides. Many functions
of the PowerPoint filter are dependent on an instance of PowerPoint
being installed on the client machine since Cumulus often loads
PowerPoint in the background to perform cataloging.
The PowerPoint filter captures thumbnails, slide notes, slide
text and font names from cataoged presentations.
Apart from the PowerPoint filter, the Cumulus Office Suite also
includes the PowerPoint AssetStore and the Cumulus add-in for PowerPoint.
The AssetStore works transparently and integrates within Cumulus
itself. The add-in offers many more possibilities - let's explore
the add-in.
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The Add-in
The Cumulus add-in needs to be loaded within PowerPoint to work
using the Tools | Add-Ins menu option. Once loaded, you'll find
a Cumulus icon within PowerPoint's Standard toolbar (see screenshot)
Cumulus also adds the Insert | Slides from Cumulus option within
PowerPoint (see screenshot)
To use the icon or the menu option, both PowerPoint and Cumulus
(with the active catalog) need to be open at the same time. You
first need to select the slide thumbnails in Cumulus and then switch
to PowerPoint and click the Cumulus icon. This inserts all the
slides from various presentations into the active PowerPoint presentation.
In addition to inserting slides within PowerPoint, Cumulus also
inserts an option within the Insert | Picture sub menu called 'From
Cumulus..' This works exactly in the same way as inserting slides
other than inserting graphic images rather than slides. You can
insert any picture cataloged in Cumulus this way as long as PowerPoint
can accept the graphic format being inserted. That's a shame though
- it would have been a nice touch to allow formats PowerPoint cannot
import directly like Photoshop, Freehand or Photo Paint through
this route since Cumulus has conversion filters built in anyway.
Other than that small grouse, Cumulus works flawlessly with PowerPoint.
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Conclusion
Cumulus Single User costs just US$99 and the Office Suite costs
another US$49. It is amazing that you get an industry standard
professional DAM tool at this price range.
Using the Cumulus Viewer add-on module (another US$499 for unlimited
use), you could perhaps create an entire presentation bank on a
cross-platform CD for executives on the move.
All put together, Cumulus helps you insert graphics into PowerPoint;
it lets you insert slides for different presentations as well.
Finally, finished presentations can be again catalogued within
Cumulus to be accessed, used and retrieved - even distributed.
That's an entire presentation workflow!
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