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

[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.