Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Imagine my surprise as I was posting a blog item in my area of InformIT, and I noticed an advertisement for a PowerPoint product I'd never heard of. The company is called Take-Off, and it's a Belgian firm that got its start by supplying real time information on flight schedules for airports.

What first intrigued me were to programs that were available from Take-Off's Web site for free.

Besides the word "free," what interested me is that these two programs expand the range of PowerPoint to areas beyond the ordinary speaker support point and click slide show.

Show What -- ShowPoint

ShowPoint is a simple add-on that lets you automatically start whatever presentation is in a designated folder. Why is this cool?

Well, suppose you want to manage a few kiosks at a trade show. Each one needs to quickly show just the presentation you want.

Click on Start > Take-off > Take-off ShowPoint > ShowPoint. Set your shared presentation folder and set the status to Started.

Then, from another computer, you can copy a new Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to your common presentation folder. Take-off ShowPoint will start the slide show automatically.

If you want to start Take-off ShowPoint automatically every time you start your computer then place this program in your Startup folder

Figure 443

There are probably many other uses for this program. Another would be when you're speaking and ready to take a break, having set up a number of different preset self running presentations, drop the one you want into the folder and walk away. The show will run automatically while you do what you need to do.

Show When -- PlanPoint

PlanPoint takes the concept to the area of "real time" by letting you decide when to automatically display a specific slide, and narrow those choices down dramatically.

Figure 444

Combining this with ShowPoint, I could see applications in waiting rooms or other public educational areas (okay, also in advertising) in which you have information in various PowerPoint presentations and slides which you need to show a pre-determined times, and you don't want to have to be there to click Play or Show.

Show Dynamic Information -- DataPoint

You might be wondering why the company is willing to give these cool little tools away for nothing. I believe the reason is that they have another product which people will be even more willing to pay for if they can make the presentation of the information seamless and easy, which the aforementioned products certainly do.

After all, presenting static information in these scenarios is fairly effective, but the real power comes in the ability to update the stuff in real time – perhaps by changing a data source that is connected to the presentation.

That is precisely what DataPoint does. It connects elements in a slide – primarily textboxes with information stored elsewhere – in a Word database, Access table, Excel workbook or other databases (including Oracle) that can handle SQL.

I had seen some examples of a similar solution at a Microsoft Developer's Conference. I was impressed, but for the fact that it took a lot of work, using the Control Toolbox and some fairly sophisticated VBA code. What I like about Take-Off is that as long as the database is fairly straightforward, using it is about as complicated as doing a mail merge in MS Word.

The example used on Take-Off's Web site is a weather application, in which the actual numbers are presumably changing all the time in the back end database. The PowerPoint slide also displays a bitmap image based on the specific image that is relevant to the information shown.

Figure 445

If you right-click the bitmap object in the slide, for example, you can see DataPoint's contextual menu showing the linked object properties.

Figure 446

In the dialog box you can see various parameters are set to show a specifically linked bitmap object that corresponds to the weather conditions being shown.

In a medical scenario this could be an image of symptoms or the label for a particular product or medicine.

Figure 447

I decided to experiment with this to see how easy or difficult it might be to connect to some databases I had been playing with.

First I connected a slide show with a specific table in an Access Database (could have been a Query), using the DataPoint menu that appears in PowerPoint when you install the product.

Figure 448

I found that connecting to simple tables and queries worked fine. Limitations to look for are parameter queries (which may require some VBA to make work) and lookup values in your fields. These will show not the referenced text but instead the numbers of the ID in the related table.

Still, not to worry, these are minor limitations. If you look through the simple samples provided by Take-Off, you can find easy connections to Access tables.

TIP

To get around the situation of using lookup values, Kurt Dupont, the head of Take-Off suggests creating a query that creates another table – Tools > Make-Table Query. Then base your slides on the fields in that table. I tried this technique and it worked fine.

When the slide is displayed you can see that the database information is updated as it is in the underlying table. Here, the clock also shows "real time."

Figure 449

I had some fun when I made a connection to an Excel database that I constructed to simplify the Access application (come to think of it, that might make a good update topic).

Here you see that it's relatively easy to connect a specific textbox in a specific slide to the information that is currently in that specific Excel cell.

Figure 450

Obviously, Excel reporting in PowerPoint is not earth-shaking, except when you consider the flexibility this gives you over how the information is displayed.

Anyone who has used an Excel or Word table or chart in PowerPoint knows the uncertainties of how the thing will look. In addition, you can't really break up the information into chunks. And all of this DataPoint lets you do quite easily.

So, if you're looking for alternative ways to report or display database information in PowerPoint, I suggest you Take-Off to the Belgian Web site and try the products. If you come up with some particularly ingenious uses, I'd love to hear about them.

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