Rough draft (04-Apr-2015)

Sharing PowerPoint presentations as videos or web-pages

PowerPoint presentations are a deservedly popular method to present information to students or to other educators.
Slideshows built using PowerPoint can also have value when viewed by individual, or groups of students.

However, a number of factors limit the "sharability" of these presentations:

• Some versions of the MS-PowerPoint application may have difficulty running presentations created with a different version.
• Some versions package all needed files (including audio and video) into the presentation, while other versions keep them as seperate files that must be in a specified (relative or absolute) filesystem location.
• Open source tools such as "LibreOffice" and "OpenOffice" have similar presentation tools, but these often do not display PowerPoint files in an acceptable way.

However, all is not doom and gloom! PowerPoint presentations can be used as the "source" to generate both videos or web-pages that are usable from a standard web browser.

• Video
  Video files based on PowerPoint presentations can be generated from within the application itself.
  A couple of important notes:
  
  • Video output is dependant on either explicitly set timings for advancement of slides or on a standard advancement interval. If you need a "pause" of undetermined duration, you must add an on-screen cue telling user to manually pause the video.
  • Use of the "Transitions" mechanism to add audio is not properly supported in video output. Instead you must use the "Animations" mechanism.
  • Since a video must follow a single, determined flow, you cannot convert "game" presentations, (such as "Jepardy") using video.
• Web Page
  A variety of companies provide software tools to convert PowerPoint presentations to web pages.
  
  "iSpring Free" is a good ( $0 ) tool.
  It is available from iSpringSolutions.com.
  
  Web versions of presentations can be configured with automatic timings, or left for total control by the user.
  
  Random flow game presentations can be done with Web output.