Presentations with Animations

Animated slides are commonly used to enhance PowerPoint presentations. An animated slide contains one or more following special features:

• Group I features: Animated texts or objects (including graphics, diagrams, charts, etc): the texts or objects with a special visual or sound effect. For example, a text bullet point can fly in from the left, one word at a time, or hear the sound of applause when a picture is uncovered. These features work as expected when displayed using RPPT.

• Group II features: Embedded multimedia clips: the movie (.mpg, .avi, etc.) or sound (.wav, .mp3, etc.) media files that has been inserted into a PowerPoint slide. These features work to limited degree when displayed using RPPT.

Group I features may be triggered by a mouse click or movement over the animation object, or by pressing PgDn on the keyboard. Both Group I and II features can also be played automatically as the animated slide shows on the screen, or triggered by a timer - played automatically after a short period of time when the animated slide shows on the screen.

The following guidelines explain how to use RPPT to perform a distributed presentation with animated slides. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with slide animation techniques in PowerPoint.

• RPPT only supports animations that involve the mouse. The reason is that RPPT captures mouse events from the master computer and emulates them on the client computers in order to trigger animations.

• RPPT supports Embedded Movies and Sound when the PowerPoint properties are set to 'auto-start' or 'timer-triggered' mode.

• A set of slides that contains an embedded movie or sound must be included in a presentation list as a local file, as opposed to a web link. The reason is that PowerPoint only saves local links to media files in animated slides.

• In order to establish the path to the linked object that has been stored with downloaded slides, you must run though a slideshow WITHOUT using RPPT, and then save the slides, before the displaying them with RPPT.

Example of Running a RPPT Session with Animated Slides

Assume we have two animated slides, as shown in Figure 7:

Master operator:

Assume the set of slides in Figure 7 is in a file named 'animation.ppt', and the embedded AVI movie file is a file named 'reactor.avi'. Both files are saved in the folder 'c:\ag\slides\ meetingMay31\'.

1. Create a presentation list, add 'c:\ag\slides\meetingMay31\animation.ppt'.

2. Save the presentation list.

3. Upload the slides and to a web-server, and request that the remote sites download them.

4. To ensure the path to the AVI movie is correctly stored in the slide as 'c:\ag\slides\meetingMay31\reactor.avi', you must run a slideshow from the folder 'c:\ag\slides\meetingMay31\', as follows:

   1. Open the Windows Explorer;

   2. Go to 'c:\ag\slides\meetingMay31\';

   3. Double-click 'animation.ppt' to bring up PowerPoint;

   4. Start slideshow by pressing F5 key;

   5. Run though all the slides;

   6. Save the slides and exit PowerPoint.

5. To begin the presentation during the meeting, double-click on the entry: 'c:\ag\slides\meetingMay31\animation.ppt' in the presentation list.

6. Use the mouse to forward slides or trigger animations. In this particular case, the slideshow starts from slide 1 with only the title text 'Slide 1' visible. After clicking mouse once, anywhere on the slide, the animated text flies out from left to right. After clicking the mouse again, anywhere on the slide, the slideshow goes to slide 2 and the embedded AVI movie starts automatically (possibly after a programmed delay.)

Client operator:

1. Download the slides and the embedded AVI movie file to a local directory, say 'd:\meetingMay31'

2. Run a slideshow to ensure the path to the AVI movie is correctly stored in the slide as 'd:\meetingMay31\reactor.avi' (rather than as 'c:\ag\slides\meetingMay31\ reactor.avi'):

   1. Open the Windows Explorer;

   2. Go to 'd:\meetingMay31\';

   3. Double-click 'animation.avi' to bring up PowerPoint;

   4. Start slideshow by pressing F5 key;

   5. Run though all the slides;

   6. Save the slides and exit PowerPoint.

3. Connect to the RPPT client to the RPPT server at the start of meeting, and watch the animated slideshow. No further local action is required.