Serving Suggestions?
As Scarlett O. would say: "I sweah, with God as my witness, I will neveh, eveh"...make seventy copies of a five page document again on that blankety-blank copy machine. It took me at least an hour, and now I have a four-inch stack of papers to lug to class on Friday.
Students should make their own copies of these Powerpoint documents, on their dime and their time. What I need (I think) is space and bandwidth on a server to house these files. The one where I keep Fragments may be adequate, I dunno. If I store it there just as the ppt file, I think a student could open it, go to "handouts" view, and print it --even from the library computers if they don't have Powerpoint on their personal computer. After a few students have printed copies, others could copy their copies. A copy could be filed (maybe?) at the library desk then, so hopefully there wouldn't be seventy downloads of the file.
If anybody has ideas, experience or suggestions, please let me know.
The university way seems unsatisfactory, involving converting Powerpoint through Frontpage to *.mht format, and I think, only opening to the slides view where one page of paper equals only one slide, vs 3 or more in the "handouts" view.
UPDATE: Yahoo Briefcase recommended by Chris O'D sounded like a good idea, but my buddy Bud in the RU library says yahoo access to files from the lib is forbidden. Shucks.
Comments
Hey Fred,
I am battling this problem at work, the marketing guys insist on making PowerPoint Presentations, and they just keep getting bigger and bigger. Then I get complaints of 'non-compatability' with older versions of PowerPoint, and some people not having it available at all.
Three things to suggest -
- Make your presentations HTML based instead, so you can have active links and such.
- Convert your PowerPoint to an Acrobat file when you are done.
- Microsoft offers a free PowerPoint Viewer.
ok, one more, I think I remember PowerPoint having the capability to save as an executable so you don't need anything to view it. But I don't have a copy of it here at home to test it. Maybe later on today I can see if thats the case.
Dave
Posted by: dave | August 26, 2004 7:51 AM
Yahoo gives you 30 MB of free storage space for files with the standard free Yahoo account. It's called Yahoo Briefcase.
Posted by: Chris | August 26, 2004 8:08 AM
Here is the URL http://briefcase.yahoo.com/
Posted by: Chris | August 26, 2004 8:09 AM
PowerPoint is so, so yukky -- see Edward Tufte's pamphlet that writes it off as Stalinist. I'm sorry they're making you do this. One of the guys at work has been told he HAS to, after all, do his presentation in PowerPoint next week, rather than actually speaking with, and engaging, his audience. He now has to reduce his talk to a series of bullet points that appear to flow in a sequence that is not borne out by, say, reality.
Posted by: Pica | August 26, 2004 10:08 AM
for a free solution, look here:
http://www.omniformat.com/
this will convert your ppt file to a pdf.
for a non free, but more feature rich solution,
think about getting some adobe software.
you should be able to get a good price with a teacher's discount:
http://www.journeyed.com/
Acrobat Pro only : $139.98
or, better deal, but higher price:
Creative Suite Premium edition : $388.98
combines full versions of:
# Adobe Photoshop CS
# Adobe Illustrator CS
# Adobe InDesign CS
# Adobe GoLive CS
# Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional.
--Jeremiah
Posted by: Jeremiah | August 26, 2004 9:57 PM
I've had good luck scanning course texts in as PDF files (so if you're able to do a conversion as suggested above . . .), and then you could either make them available as an electronic reserve through your library (if they have something along those lines), or else simply create a course blog (which is what I do), with clickable links to those PDF files that can be doled out throughout the semester? (You should, I would think, have some storage space through the institution where you work, where you can ftp the PDF files in some sort of www folder and then link to them from there.)
Posted by: Artichoke Heart | August 28, 2004 10:38 AM