Monthly Archives: August 2006

Well, the PowerPoint/Keynote tip that I posted on Friday saved my butt this morning.

I’m currently in charge of A/V stuff (music, sound, video, computer) during my church’s Sunday morning services. Wherever I can, I use Keynote for the presentations. This morning, Luis was scheduled to spend a few minutes at the end of the service sharing about his recent missions trip to Peru. My pastor told me that Luis would have four or five pictures to share on the screen.

Luis showed up with a USB drive containing 55 pictures.

Now, this is a good thing. He had lots of great photos of the trip to share with the congregation. But I was left with only a few minutes to get 55 pictures into this morning’s Keynote file.

Using Friday’s tip, this was a breeze. Each of the 55 pictures was imported and placed onto its own slide in about 90 seconds. In fact, the only obstacle I ran into was trying stop one of the kids from making shadow puppets in front of the projector while I worked on it.

So in the end, Luis shared some really interesting pictures with us. It was very humbling to see the circumstances in which many Peruvians live. As Jen and I contemplate moving or renovating, it was striking to see homes with no roofs, or with walls made out of cardboard.

I hate PowerPoint. Really. I prefer to use Keynote whenever I can. But sometimes, I’m forced to use PowerPoint. Like today.

Recently, my boss asked me to prepare some charts based on our students’ PSSA scores. Easy enough. I spent a few hours wrestling with Excel and got some decent looking charts. Twenty-nine of them, in fact. I saved each one out to a PNG file (because I’m a snob and I like PNGs). So far, so good.

He also asked me to create a PowerPoint slide show, with each chart on a separate slide. Ewwww. That’s twenty-nine slides to make. Not difficult work, but very tedious. Create a slide, drag the picture in. Rinse and repeat. Twenty-nine times.

There has to be a better way.

Turns out, there is. If you have Keynote, that is.

Fire up Keynote and make a new, blank presentation. Grab your pictures in the Finder, and then drag them into the empty space beneath the slide thumbnails on the left. Keynote wil create a new slide, each containing one of your pictures, nicely centered on the slide. Nifty.

From there, I did a quick and painless “Export to PowerPoint” and I was good to go.

If anyone has any tips for doing something similar without involving Keynote, I’m all ears. It would be nice to have a more cross-platform solution than this, but this solved my problem for today.

By the way, for a chuckle, check out the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation. And for good measure, here’s a site dedicated to good presentations.

Some good things that have happened/are happening.

1. Tom and Audra are getting hitched. Congratulations! My prayer for you is to be as happy as Jen and I are.
2. Tangelo 1.5 Public Beta is out and the skins contest is underway.
3. I burned a CD in Ubuntu Linux. I know it sounds silly, but I can remember when getting a floppy disk to show up in Linux was cause for celebration. My PC dual boots between XP Home and Ubuntu Linux. I mostly keep it in XP so Grace can play her games and stuff. I installed Ubuntu mostly just to experiment; I don’t expect to use it as a main OS. Although, I must admit, it’s much better than I expected it to be.
4. Dan is moving to Portland. Honestly, I’m kinda sad about this, since I’ve come to value Dan tremendously as a friend, but I’m happy for him. He’s doing what he wants to do, and you have to respect that. Here’s hoping we find a good replacement for his position at work.
5. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m itching to start playing in a band again. Nothing definite yet, but some progress has been made on that front. Stay tuned.
6. I finally started work on my bug database (programming bugs, not insects) after talking and thinking about it for like two years. I’ve decided to call it Thrip, at least for now. A thrip is some kind of bug that likes citrus fruit.
7. Got a raise. Cha-ching!
8. The latest issue of RBDeveloper has my Kodiak article in it!
9. Jen and I watched three of the five original Planet of the Apes movies. Hugely entertaining. My bro-in-law taped all five when AMC ran its marathon a couple years back and lent me the tape. These are movies I’ve been meaning to watch for years, but I never got around to it. We still have to watch Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and then I think we’ll be ready to watch the remake Tim Burton made with Marky Mark in 2001. This all, of course, made me think of Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want To Get Off! (YouTube link) from The Simpsons.
10. New folks on Worship Team at church. I’m blessed to be surrounded by incredibly talented and humble people in ministry there. How I ended up leading this team I’ll never know, but I’m grateful to serve alongside such people.
11. I got to be in the dunk tank at our church picnic a couple weeks ago. That was a hoot, although I’m not sure whether to be flattered or offended at the number of people that lined up to take a shot at me.

I guess that’s about it for now. I’m trying to get back to regular updates…

No matter how tough, no matter how strong, every man becomes a total, sniveling wimp when there’s a stretched rubber band pointed at his face.