Have you ever gone on vacation and wanted an easy way to share photos with your family and friends? Maybe you’re an art teacher that teaches an online class and you would like to share slides with everyone in the class. There is a super easy way to create a photo album slide show in PowerPoint 2010. It is also extremely easy to share this photo album with anybody in the world using a free service built into PowerPoint 2010. Let’s get started!

We’ll begin by opening PowerPoint. By default, you should see a blank PowerPoint show. Click the “Insert” tab on the ribbon toolbar and then find a button that says “Photo Album”. Click “Photo Album” and choose “New Photo Album” from the menu. See the image below for an example.

A dialog box will pop up, as pictured below. Click the button that says “File/Disk” to bring up a file selection window.

In the file selection window, navigate to the folder that contains the pictures you would like to have in your album. In the picture below, you will see that I have selected multiple pictures. I did this by holding the ctrl key down and clicking each picture that I wanted to select. Once you have all of the pictures that you want to include selected, click the “Insert” button.

You will be taken back to the “Edit Photo Album” dialog box. There are several options in this dialog, as you can see in the picture below. You can rearrange the order of the pictures. On the far right side, there is a small toolbar for quick photo edits, such as brightness and contrast. You can also change the layout of the slide to hold multiple photos. The “Theme” dropdown lets you pick one of PowerPoint’s built in color schemes.

Below, you can see what a photo album slide show looks like.

Now that we have our photo album designed, we have to figure out how we want to distribute it. There are two ways I would like to show you how to do this. The first way is to save it as a PowerPoint show. A PowerPoint show can be emailed and the person on the receiving end can see the slides without having to see them in edit mode. One thing you might want to do, if you set it up as a show, is configure the slides to automatically change. To do this you click on the “Slide Show” tab and click the button that says “Set Up Slide Show”, as pictured below.

Below, you can see a picture of the “Set Up Show” dialog box. Here you can configure the slide show to open full screen and to advance either manually or automatically. This is also the place you go if you want a presentation to loop over and over until you stop it.

Now that we have the settings in place, let’s save the show. In the save window pictured below, you will notice a “Save As Type” dropdown. In this instance, we want to choose “PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx)”. This puts it in a format we can email to people for viewing.

The second way you can share your PowerPoint show is via a new feature in 2010 called “Broadcast”. The broadcast will allow you to present your show online for free. A link is generated that you can send to people. When they click the link, they will be taken to a web page where they view the show in real time as you present it to them. In the picture below, you can see how this is done. Click “File”, “Broadcast Slide Show”, then click the “Broadcast Slide Show” button.

A “Broadcast Slide Show” dialog box appears, where you click the button that says “Start Broadcast”.

A link is created that you can send to the people you want to view the show. Now you can get everyone in a conference call and click the “Start Slide Show” button. As you click through the slides, the people you invited will see the slide advance on the web page they are viewing. It’s as simple as that, and it’s free!

I hope you have enjoyed today’s tutorial. I think that this is a great way to cross geographical boundaries and share photos and presentations. What about you? Have you used this service? Do you have any ideas that you would suggest for its use?

As always, we appreciate your feedback. Thanks for reading Techie Buzz!

Symbian users, you will finally get some benefits of the Nokia-Microsoft partnership. Up until now, the Nokia-MS deal was all about two sinking ships (Nokia and WP7)  joining hands to form one big ship, which hopefully will not sink.

Nokia and Microsoft have now joined hands to bring Microsoft Apps to Symbian Belle users. The Microsoft Apps package will consist of apps which will help in boosting the productivity of the user. The list of apps include Microsoft Lync 2010, PowerPoint Broadcast, OneNote and MS Document Connection. Symbian Belle users will get all the above stated apps for free sometime in the fourth quarter of this year.

MS Lync will allow users to have audio/video meetings on the go, while PowerPoint Broadcast will allow them to quickly broadcast Powerpoint presentations from their PC to mobile. The OneNote app is a rich note taking app from the Redmond based company, which syncs with SkyDrive.

Microsoft will also release another update in early-2012 which will add OneNote sync, along with bringing native versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint  to Symbian. This is the first time that the MS Word and other apps will be released for a mobile OS other than Windows Mobile or WP7.

I’ve been slacking in my Microsoft patent coverage and a weekend of nothing interesting made me go back to the bookmarked applications. I tweeted about this when I came across it and believe that it is indeed the obvious future of boardroom presentations. Controlling PowerPoint or Keynote with phones is passé given that we could simply navigate through presentations with voice or gestures. A Kinect hack already exists leveraging the Xbox Kinect with a Windows PC allowing you to control presentation Minority Report style. Now, Microsoft has patented an implementation which signals addition of this in PowerPoint natively or through a plugin. Microsoft has applied for more than one patents on making presentations a lot more interactive. Manipulating visualizations with (finger) touch and hands-free (Kinect) control of presentations are explained. The two patent applications don’t complement each other but cater to different use cases.

The first application explains how a user can choose data and intuitively turn into charts using touch. The application further highlights ability to change graph types used to represent the data. The claims put into perspective how Microsoft sees presentations being done on a tablet (10Windows 8 touch screen device). The user will be able to circle a bar graph with his pointer finger and the damn thing will turn into a pie chart that’s pretty wicked. Move your finger over a bar graph and turn it into a line chart! One of the images shows circling a single bar on the chart and a pop-up with statistics about the particular bar shows up.

Windows 8 and Office on a tablet now sound a lot more exciting, right?

The second application is simply Kinect’s gesture brought into PowerPoint. While it seems straightforward, the applications details an implementation where the people in the room will be tagged as:

• Primary user
• Secondary user
• Observer

The point in tagging users in the room is to allow collaboration. Some excerpts from the patent:

The gestures may control a variety of aspects of the gesture-based system. The gestures may control anything display on a screen, such as adding words to a document, scrolling down, or paging through a document, spanning a column in a spreadsheet, pivoting or rotating a three-dimensional figure, zoom in or out, or the like.

Any computing environment networked in the same gesture-based system may therefore process captured data from any number of capture devices also networked in the gesture-based system.

The gestures may incorporate audio commands or audio commands may supplement the user’s gestures. For example, the user may gesture to add a bullet to a document and then speak words that are then added to the document, following the bullet point. The system may recognize the combination of the gesture to add a bullet and the audio as a control to add the bullet and then write the spoken words to follow the bullet.

The application refers to an older patent I came across where a user’s customized gestures will be stored and available over a network thereby enabling a user to feel comfortable while interacting with the system.

Patent 1

Patent 2

Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful presentation tool. When used effectively, it can add visual appeal and support for a presentation. In this article, I would like to introduce you to a little used feature that PowerPoint provides called the Outline view. One common mistake that I see people make when designing a presentation, is that they often go straight to design mode rather than have their thoughts organized in a logical manner. This is like painting drywall before it is hung on the studs. Below you will see a partial view of the basic PowerPoint window. Along the left side of the window you will notice that a miniature version of the slide is viewable. As slides are added to the presentation, the miniatures will become viewable on this side of the window. If you look to the right of the tab that says Slides, you will see a tab labeled Outline. Let’s click on the outline view.

Once you have clicked on the Outline view, you will notice an even smaller slide icon. If you click to the right of that icon and begin typing, you will notice that the slide preview area on the right will fill in the Title area of the slide. I typed the title of my presentation and hit enter on the keyboard. By default, this will start a new slide. However, I wanted to add text to the subtitle area of the first slide. To achieve this, I clicked the Increase Indentbutton (blown up in the picture below) which moved the text under the title. Notice how PowerPoint recognized that. Since I started a new level in my outline, it should put that text in a new level on the slide. Now when I hit enter again, the text will be on that same level. In order for me to start a new slide I need to hit Decrease Indentbutton. This will move the text back a level and start a new slide. Now I can continue to outline my ideas and PowerPoint will generate slides and bullet points based on what I type.

Below you will see where I typed in a general heading of Get More Training. I then hit enter and clicked the Increase Indentbutton to create bullet points for my slide. If I hit Increase Indentagain you will notice it creates sub points.

I really believe this is a good way to work on a PowerPoint presentation, as it forces you to get your thoughts in order,   while creating the basic shell of your presentation. Once you have your outline all lined out, then you can start the task of adding colors and themes to your presentation.

==== About the Author ====

Darrin Jenkins is an IT manager for a large electrical contractor in Louisville Kentucky. Darrin posts his helpful advice at the SayGeek blog.

Office 2010 is definitely a great improvement from previous versions of Office. One of the features I have liked is the ability to insert videos and audio from websites like YouTube in a presentation (hacks for video insertion in previous office versions).

However, certain versions of PowerPoint 2010 grey out the option to insert videos and only allow you to insert videos from a file. The problem is that inserting videos from websites is not available in 64-bit versions of Office 2010 or PowerPoint 2010 due to it requiring a 64-bit Adobe Flash installation.

The same feature is available on a 32-bit installation. So if you are using a 64-bit version of Office or PowerPoint 2010 you will be unable to insert videos into your presentation from sites like YouTube.

Is there a workaround? Yes, there are couple of workarounds. First of all you could grab yourself a 64-bit version of Adobe Flash from Adobe Labs and install it to solve your problem. The 64-bit active-x for Internet Explorer worked for me. However, you must note that the 64-bit version of Adobe Flash is in beta stage and may result in frequent browser crashes, though I haven’t seen any yet.

Another alternative will involve a lot more work than simply using the feature itself. To insert videos in your presentation. You will first have to download the videos to your desktop (resources for downloading videos from internet to your desktop) and then insert it as a file into your presentation.

Hopefully, the Adobe Flash 64-bit player will be available to public in near future, thus solving a problem with inserting web videos in PowerPoint presentations.

A popular hitch for the Microsoft PowerPoint user is that it is not possible to insert MP3-files in presentations. MP3 AddIn is a program which solves this problem by aiding you in implanting MP3 files into your PowerPoint without the necessity of converting them using external tools, such as MP3Converter and Quick Media Converter that would entirely convert the file.

When creating presentations, lots of users stumble upon the dilemma of integrating MP3 files into their presentations as PowerPoint requires the audio to be in the WAV file format. With MP3 AddIn, however, you dont need to lose sleep as it internally adds a header and modifies the file name of the MP3 file, tricking’ PowerPoint into dealing with it as if it were a WAV file.A major plus point of only altering the header of the MP3 file is the size.While a real file alteration will lead to great file size transformations,the new WAV file does not occupy much space (about 2 byte larger than the original MP3 file).

MP3Add In lets you relish the advantage of MP3 files while keeping your presentation super micro and tidy.Moreover, you no longer need to consider adding the different MP3files with your presentation when mailing it to friends or clients. It also has an idiot-proof interface with no snags or complex streaming options so you can embed MP3 files into PowerPoint very effortlessly indeed!

Download MP3 AddIn here