The PowerPoint Ezine - 61

by Geetesh Bajaj, August 23rd 2005

Winners and Giveaways

Indezine Photos is again giving away a new photo for you to use in your presentations - you'll find tons of affordable pictures on the site - do take a look. And here's your free photo...

The best thing about Indezine Photos is that you can buy one picture - you don't have to take a full subscription for just one picture!

And now for more goodies - pptXTREME is giving away three copies of their Color Picker product that allows you to pick your colors in PowerPoint. All you need to do is fill in this form. Mention "Color Picker" in the Comments field - the sweepstakes ends on August 31st, 2005.

Last ezine's giveaway of the Bio Meadows collection of PowerPoint templates is not given away yet and I'll announce the winners in the next ezine issue.

Here are some new articles and happenings:

Ppted.com just released several new collections including Soundscapes, Wavelength and Nursing - do take a look!

SmartDraw.com is offering an all-new sports clip art library and 2006 calendar templates at no charge whatsoever. Click here for to download these and a trial copy of SmartDraw.

And for those who want to come to PowerPoint Live in San Diego from September 25th to 28th, time's running out - check out their site...

Focus on DataPoint

DataPoint is a product that interfaces PowerPoint with databases. It's from a Belgium based company called PresentationPoint. In this Indezine exclusive, Kurt Dupont, who heads PresentationPoint discusses more about DataPoint.

Geetesh: What are the possibilities of integrating PowerPoint with databases?

Kurt: By integrating PowerPoint with external data sources, you can run self-updating presentations that display the latest information. You can run live presentations in a company displaying production figures, announcements, live news or at a school to display teacher absences, class room changes etc.

Also, many people are used to use PowerPoint for reporting like project status, production progress etc., all enriched with data and charts. Now when you have the ability to link external data source to PowerPoint you can now see those reports with the latest information, when you want it. You only have to set up the links once.

You can simply display a live clock or link text boxes, images, charts and all others via OLE with the content of the data source.

Our DataPoint product makes all this possible.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the different versions of DataPoint.

Kurt: In the beginning, we only had one version of DataPoint, now we have three of them - the free Viewer, the Standard Edition and the Enterprise Edition. The disadvantage (especially in larger companies using numerous licenses of DataPoint) was that you needed a licensed DataPoint version installed on your system to view the dynamic presentations. Now we have an answer to that issue; DataPoint Enterprise Edition. With this edition you can now create presentations to be viewed with the free DataPoint viewer. You can compare this functionality with Adobe’s Acrobat Distiller product and the PDF viewer. The dynamic content is refreshed automatically when you open the presentation.

But the Enterprise Edition can do more - you can now also create dynamic presentations to be used with our MessagePoint product. MessagePoint is a screen saver that runs a PowerPoint presentation when the computer is idle. Now with the integration of our DataPoint functionality inside the screen saver you can now also run your screen saver with up-to-date information in it. This functionality can replace an intranet solution. The problem with an intranet solution is that the user has to go to the intranet to view the content. Now with a screen saver you bring your information to the users automatically. When a user comes back from lunch he will see the latest news running on his screen.

Next to the free DataPoint Viewer and the Enterprise Edition you have the Standard Edition that can be best compared with the old stand-alone DataPoint program. With this version you can only create dynamic presentations that can be viewed on a PC with DataPoint installed too.

Geetesh: How can one retain visual identity of a presentation while working with DataPoint - I mean using a database to send pictures to PowerPoint slides. Is that possible?

Kurt:Sure that can be done. You can create an image placeholder and define via a database which images should be shown, where and at what time. Very simple. There is other software available that is used as Point-of-Sales or dynamic signage software. Those are big words and expensive - but you can also do this with simply using PowerPoint, DataPoint and some creativity.

Note from Geetesh: You can download a free trial version of DataPoint from the PresentationPoint site...

PowerPoint Versions

Someone I know very well just asked me a question - can you please provide me with a list of PowerPoint versions with their corresponding version numbers - for example Version 10 = PowerPoint 2002?

An online search got no results - that's the reason I'm including this listing in this issue of the ezine.

Here are the corresponding versons:

Version 11 - PowerPoint 2003
Version 10 - PowerPoint 2002
Version 9 - PowerPoint 2000
Version 8 - PowerPoint 97
Version 7 - PowerPoint 95
Version 4 - PowerPoint 4
Version 3 - PowerPoint 3
Version 2 - PowerPoint 2

There were no versions 5 and 6 of PowerPoint since Microsoft wanted all components of Office 95 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access) to share the same version. Since the last version of Word before that was 6, all Office applications included in Office 95 became version 7.

And PowerPoint was a Mac product ported to Windows only after version 2 - so there was no version 1.

Anyway, most of this is historic - you'll rarely stumble across a presentation created in anything older than PowerPoint 97 (i.e. version 8).

Do you want to share some PowerPoint trivia? Do contact me from the feedback form....

End Note

More PowerPoint related info on the PowerPoint Blog and PowerPoint Notes. And free PowerPoint templates for all of you....

Until next time - have a nice day. And keep the feedback coming..

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