A snapshot of my day today, after a couple of Very Important Meetings:
2:30 pm – “Oh, hey, I’m giving a presentation on Web 2.0 to the staff tomorrow. I should probably start the Powerpoint…”
2:45 – After working diligently in Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 (including spending quality time trying to find the perfect style to apply), I wanted to embed a video. How do I do that? To the Google!
2:50 – Keywords search “embed youtube powerpoint 2007″ yields this fantastic video on YouTube which showed me exactly what I needed to know. Success!!
3:10 – “What were those videos Shelley Bernstein and Jane Burton shared with us at AAM…?” Cue more keyword searching, this time in YouTube itself; “brooklyn video thief” and “tate modern bear“. Got the first one right away. The Tate video I had to go to the Tate’s website (horrors!!), find the right area (Tate Online and TateShots), and snoop around. Keywords didn’t help much, but getting the artist’s name sure did. Got em! Embed…
3:10-3:30 – Mining my memory for all of the videos and content from the various Web 2.0 sessions I’ve attended, and plugging in vague bits of memory, hoping someone has blogged about these sessions and that my keywords will yield gold. Hey! look! There’s the content I wanted!
3:30-5:00 – another Very Important Meeting.
5:30 – I realize that I have an appointment and I will never get this presentation done today. Gonna have to do it tonight. Oh, I should email my Powerpoint to myself and upload those links to del.icio.us…
6:15 – Back at my favorite coffee shop, nursing a big pot of tea and connecting to the Wifi. I realize that there is no way the cord from the projector will be able to reach The Precious and I will have to use my new laptop for the presentation tomorrow. I don’t have Office 2007 on it, but I do have the Open Office Impress program. Let’s see how the embedded videos work…
6:20-7:00 – After the embedded YouTube videos failed to play on the Impress slideshow (and learning there is no way to embed the Flash-based videos into Impress), I searched for and downloaded various tools to 1) download the videos, 2) convert the videos from *.flv to *.avi format and 3) play the videos on whatever whackadoo version of Windows Media Player Vista comes pre-installed with (hooray for codecs!).
7:15 – CRAP! The embedded AVIs work, but they autoplay when I get to the slide and there are no controls to pause the video. Well that’s not gonna fly… What if I just link to the videos…?
7:30 – At this point, I’m having some problems with the style conversions in Impress, and I’m not going to be able to finish this slideshow tonight. But working on it in the morning in Powerpoint 2007 won’t solve a lot of my problems. Wait a sec…
7:35 – I upload the file to Google Docs. Fingers crossed, I look at the videos. Totally hosed. But wait! What’s that button along the top which says “embed video?” I push it and there’s a fantastic search tool which automatically links to YouTube. YES!!!!! AND I can have multiple videos on the slides, AND they have play/pause controls!
7:45 – Cue jubilant dancing (just like Matt):
8:00-9:00 – Oh hey, anything new on the internet?
9:00 – Head home and realize that I can continue to work on the presentation easily tomorrow morning, since the problems have been ironed out. Hurrah!
Thanks Web 2.0! YOU’RE THE BEST!!!
May 20th, 2008 11:11
Excellent! I’ve been trying to think of the “better” alternative to PDF and PPT, neither of which handle embedded media with any grace, for ages. I’ll bet this works even better on Zoho, too….