Using PowerPoint to Create a Blog Slide Show

An article by Darin Wagner    No Comments

A colleague wanted to make a PowerPoint presentation available on her blog site for students to view. I told her that we could post the presentation as a .pps (PowerPoint Show) file on the site for students to download. But I reminded her that we never really know if the end user (the students) has the software capable of viewing at home. To post something that might not be usable would be frustrating.

That led me to think about some other potential solutions, and I think I have one – a combination of PowerPoint and WordPress to create an online slides how. This is how it works…

I created a presentation on backyard birds in PowerPoint, but instead of saving as a traditional presentation I saved the slides in an images format (.jpg). To do this I went to the menu bar and chose File > Save As. When the “Save As” window appeared, I looked for the “Save as type:” field in the lower center of the image. There are lots of other options for saving, but because of the color range on the slides I chose the .jpg format.

I then uploaded the images to my WordPress media gallery and then inserted them  in this post. To give the simulated slide show appearance, I have installed the Lightbox 2 plugin for WordPress. With this plugin, when an image in a post is clicked, an overlay appears with links between all the images on the page. To view the show, click on any of the images below.

Advantages:

• If the user / student can get to a web page, then they can see the images and are not dependent on having Office 2007
• I am familiar with PowerPoint and can knock out a presentation fairly quickly
• The Save As… jpg feature turns the slides to images instantly

Disadvantages:

• Familiarity with WordPress is a must to create this type of post
• Lightbox 2, or a similar plugin, must be installed for the slide show effect
• Some font size issues might arise (if you notice the credit line below the title), so I have to be careful to limit text and keep the fonts large

All in all, I am pleased with the outcome. What do you think? Would this work for you? Please share your thoughts!