News for November, 2009

Did the first quarter really come and go that quickly? Are we really shopping for turkeys already?

Our latest major project has to do with PowerPoint presentations. Several users have commented that they are using the older version of Microsoft PowerPoint (1997-2003), which goes under the file extension ".ppt", as opposed to the latest version (2007), which goes under the file extension ".pptx".

Here's the deal: We create all of our PowerPoints as .pptx files. Then we save them as .ppt files. This would be terrific, except that a lot of the fancy new features in PowerPoint do not work in the 1997-2003 version. The result is .pptx files that look terrific, and .ppt files that might not look so great. The complaint from users downloading .ppt files has been that they have had to waste time cleaning up the presentations before they could use them.

We have a better solution. And no, it doesn't require upgrading to the latest version of PowerPoint! Instead, we have saved each presentation as a .pdf file which you can read and display using Adobe Acrobat Reader. In fact, you can view and print the PowerPoints as .pdf files online (straight from your browser) without having to download them at all.

While we were at it, we went ahead and created student notes hand-outs of the presentations. Each page of the handouts looks like this: along the left side are three miniature versions of the slides, and along the right side are lines for student notes. These files are also in .pdf format, meaning that you can view or view and print them straight from your browser.

This project involves going through all of our PowerPoints and "redoing" them. We are more than halfway finished. We thank you for your patience and ask that you bear with us for just a little bit longer.