Comments on: Friday Focus #19

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:59:54 +0000

I sort of misunderstood the dilemma but would still use a slideshow if someone gave me content and was adamant about keeping it in a powerpoint like format. The nice thing about the slideshows is that a few that I’ve looked at are pretty easy to edit.

By: Qwest

Qwest — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:23:43 +0000

@ Ben, I never thought of a javascript sideshow! Good thinking!

By: Ronald Huereca

Ronald Huereca — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:56:53 +0000

I must admit that the first dilemma was my own. The client didn’t necessarily want a slideshow, but just used powerpoint to lay out (in one slide) how they wanted a particular page to look.

My personal approach was to take a full-screen screenshot of the slideshow and paste it into Photoshop. For the images that needed to be transparent, I used the background eraser. For the images that could standalone, I just cut them out and created new images. For the content, I cut and paste the content into notepad and then into dreamweaver and styled the content accordingly.

It was more time consuming than anything. I was just curious if there were other ways to get a non-technical client to deliver content other than via powerpoint. Ideally we would have a content management system, but our network is so locked down, a CMS isn’t possible.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:55:46 +0000

For the design dilemma, there's always the option of using one of the numerous javascript slideshows. Eric Meyer, Robert Nyman and a few others have put together some great versions.

By: Qwest

Qwest — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 13:39:08 +0000

My approach to the design dilemma, never having worked with powerpoint files before, would be to see if I could convert the powerpoint file first.

See if I could convert it to a flash file to try and keep the interactivity of the file.

If that’s no good, then my next would option would be to re-create it in a different format.

IF the client didn’t want the look changed, and wasn’t too bothered whether the user could interact with it, I’d convert it into a video file (fla / avi etc) and display that on the site.