Useful software notification

[johnridley]

I had a PowerPoint 2007 file that needed to be displayed on the church's machine, which only had PowerPoint 2003 installed. I threw on PP2007 Reader which was fine but wouldn't go on the 2nd monitor. This is a known long term issue that MS refuses to fix, probably because they want you to buy a copy of PP even for display-only machines like this one.

After some Googling, I found a program called WinWarden which sits in memory, has an INI file by which you can tell it "whenever a window is created with a name that matches this pattern, shove it over 1024 pixels to the right" which makes it go to the 2nd monitor.

WinWarden is actually capable of a ton more than just that, but it solved this problem for me. We don't use PP that often, we have dedicated software for this machine but a couple of times a year it'll be useful.

Comments

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Why don't you just save the thing as a PDF?

The thought of church presentations that require animation is... boggling.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Animation can be quite nice. We show videos sometimes too.

However, when someone shows up with a PPT file for a version that we don't have any software to read let alone change, and 15 minutes to go before things start, it's best to just have the ability to show it as is.

Besides, I'm not sure I believe that a PDF would respond properly to the presentation remote and snap in each page exactly to the page boundaries, and I don't know if PDF viewers have full page modes with no controls showing. PDF would seem to me to be a hell of a kludgy shoehorn; showing stuff on projectors is what powerpoint was built for, why not use it?

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Animations are the main reason to *not* use PDF.

That said, PDF is pretty darn optimal when you don't really know who's going to bring what to display on what platform. There are even online services for this.

Recall the circumstances I'm likely to have experienced this in. :-)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Well, powerpoint is pretty universal and once we're set up for it, we're good. When we have people just show up to do presentations, 90% of the time, they have a PPT or PPTX file. It only makes sense to be set up for that.

The rest of the time it's just a CD or thumb drive full of JPGs, or a DVD.

I really have no idea what circumstances you'd have experienced this in.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

IETF. International conference with people with all sorts of versions of powerpoint, many only partially compatible with each other. That's not even including non-PPT presentation software or various i18n'd software that didn't want to play nice.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a situation where I'd just say "here's VGA and HDMI points. Plug your laptop in."

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Great for the presentation itself when it works. Most working groups moved away from that model since laptop changeover and fussing ate too much of a timeslot.

But even then, the presentations are part of the archived material.