Showing a PowerPoint file in your blog

This article is about options for showing the contents of a PowerPoint file inside your blog.

Overview

Previously I've described how to load content from MS Word to your blog.

But some people have material in PowerPoint (or other presentation software) files, that they want to show in their blog.   So far, I've identified four options for doing this.

These approaches should work on any PowerPoint formatted presentation, no matter what tool it was prepared with - except of course if it was Google Docs in which case you go straight to option 2.

Option 1: Each slide as an image

Follow these steps:

• In PowerPoint, choose Save-as, and choose an image format (eg .png).   
• When the system asks if you want all slides or just the current one, choose All.
• Upload all the image files that were created to your blog - it's your choice whether you put them all in the same post, or one-per-post.
  I usually upload them firstly to Picasa web albums or another picture-hosting service, and then just link from my blog to there)

At first, I thought that this was a backward approach.  But recently I wrote an article based on a presentation that I gave several years ago.   After trying various ways of displaying the presentation and  the article, I realised that I was trying to find a way to include all the comments that I made when I used the presentation face-to-face.  To do this, I needed to show each slide individually, so I used this option because it gives full control over what commentary goes with each picture.

Option 2: Convert to a Google Docs Presentation

This is described in detail in  Using Google Docs's publish-and-embed option - I believe it's better than trying to use Google Web-elements, because it achieves much the same thing, and takes one piece (web-elements) out of the equation.

Option 3 Copy and Paste

As with MS Word, copy-and-paste from PowerPoint to Blogger is NOT recommended, because the PowerPoint content can have all sorts of extra HTML codes attached to it, and these can cause negative effects in your blog.

But you may want to copy-and-paste, either because you don't want the content as images, or because you want other things like presenter notes etc that are not stored in the presentation slides.

To do this, you need to:

• Copy from PowerPoint, 
• Paste into a text-editor (eg Notepad in Microsoft Windows)
• Copy again from the text-editor
• Paste into your blog.

An alternative may be to export the presentation as an outline (ie rich-text or RTF format), and then convert it via Google Docs in the same way that you would for a Word document.   You would need to test this to check if it brings in the items that are stored outside of the slides.

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Related Articles:

Showing a PowerPoint presentation as a slideshow in your blog

Converting from MS Word to Blogger, via Google Docs

File hosting options - places to keep your files on-line

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog
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