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.
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.