How to control a PowerPoint presentation from Excel

I am trying to run a presentation on Zoom. But I don’t want the Zoom participants to see some of the slides I am using in the background (it is a game). So I need to run the whole thing from Excel.

The way to link to a specific slide in Powerpoint from a cell in excel is simple.

Save your Powerpoint as a ppsx = slide show

Link as follows “yourfilename”.ppsx# e.g. yourgame.ppsx#5

Tips:

once you have got it all set up remember that you are linking to a specific slide number. So you need to keep that slide number the same in your ppsx. If you need to delete a slide then add a blank one instead.

If the slide you are pointing to is animated you will need to ‘re-copy’ the slide to the ppts to refresh it before a second use. In other words get all the slides ready in the pptx, duplicate any slides with animations that you wish to use more than once. And then create a fresh ppts before you start your show. I found that I needed to re-boot the computer to ‘clear’ the ppts slide show.

Good Luck!

Re-installing purchases made in Microsoft Store – 2020

Open Microsoft store in Windows 10

Click on the … (menu – top right)

Click on My Library

Click install next to the name of the produce you want to re-install

Cropping / Retaining image quality

Having spent over 30 minutes researching various on-line and downloadable apps it seems none provide the quality of good old Paint!

Although the cropping technique is not as easy – crop / select rectangle (in my case) / use mouse to select the area you want to finish with / crop (which will delete the rest of the picture – the result, when saved with png, seems to retain all the quality of the original image.

How to use OneDrive to manage your photos

Summary

1. Open Windows Explorer
   1. Put all the photographs you want to manage in the Pictures folder in OneDrive
   2. Organise them into appropriate groups to help  you find them
   3. For a group you want to show to people – maybe using a slideshow feature – edit the good photo’s and delete the ones you don’t want to keep.
2. Open Microsoft Photo’s
   1. Go to folders
   2. Choose a folder you’d like to make into an album
   3. Select the first picture and then use shift select on the last picture to ‘select all’ (there is no ‘select all’ feature at the moment (July 2019).
   4. Right click and select ‘save to album’
   5. Go to albums, select the album you want to view, select slideshow

At the time of writing the slideshow feature in Microsoft Photo’s is really basic.  It is to be hoped that Microsoft will significantly improve.

Benefits of this style of approach

• You can share a OneDrive folder with someone
• You can download all your pictures on to a Smartphone which has OneDrive loaded. This means you do not have to rely on an internet connection to see them and loading time is faster.
• If you are already paying for Microsoft 365 you don’t have to pay for Flickr as well

Tips

You can remove the less good photo’s from an album which won’t delete them from OneDrive.

Google Calendar not working on Chrome

I was not able to edit calendar entries.  Sometimes I was not able to add all the details of a new event. I tried clearing the cache, cookies, the lot – to no avail.

Searching the internet it seemed a Chrome re-installation was necessary.  I tried to uninstall Chrome – fortunately this was not possible – effectively blocked since Chrome opened every time the uninstaller started!

I say fortunately because I then decided to investigate repair type solution.  If you go into advance settings in Chrome there is an option to re-set Chrome.  It took less than a second and it sorted the problem.

Suggest you save your bookmarks first however mine all seem to have come back without re-importing.  The ‘set of pages’ to open (when you first open Chrome) are retained – you just need to activate them.

Leos Strings – First Saturday event – Feb 2nd, 2019

A really enjoyable performance by such talented musicians.  Leos strings accepted suggestions from the floor which resulted in music from Mozart to Morecambe &Wise and from Bach to the Beatles.  Judging by the audience reaction everyone had a wonderful time

SideSync

Just discovered this app which has been around for at least 3 years.

I wanted to better use my Ordnance Survey maps which have recently become available on my Samsung Galaxy S7 phone for a very reasonable price – £20 p.a.  My problem was plotting a route on the phone to the accuracy I wanted.

So I was looking for an app that would control the phone with my mouse using bluetooth whilst connecting my phone to a big monitor.

Sidesync pretty much fits the bill.  The big bonus is that I can type messagages (including WhatsApp) whilst using my desktop.  This is good for two main reasons

• I am much quicker typing on a keyboard
• I can copy and paste links etc. much more easily

This is how it looks with the screen minimised

 

Convert PDF to Word

This is an excerpt from an article in PC Magazine

As of Word 2013 (released in 2012), Microsoft has offered a function called PDF Reflow. It does what you expect. In Word, you go to the File tab, select open, select any PDF File, and open it right up for editing, as if it was a Word DOCX file.

There are limitations, however. The PDF you open in Word will have all the content, but it probably won’t look exactly right. That’s because PDFs are “fixed”—while the data is there, the file doesn’t store the relationship between the data (such as the position on the page). Word documents are all about exacting that placement.

For more details please click here

Saving a file from Word 2013 to PDF is as simple as doing a Save as from the File tab. You should check the boxes on the save dialog box that say “Open File After Publishing” to immediately view it.

How to post a MadMimi mailing into WordPress!

I generally use Mad Mimi to send out mailings since it is easy to use and produces lovely results. Not only that, their help desk is second to none.
I have tried in the past to post the results on a WordPress site and it has been messy since you need to convert the pdf’s to a picture format (unless you are happy just to link to the pdf – I prefer to display the attractive output created by Mad Mimi).

Finally found a quick and easy way to do thanks to Mad Mimi providing a pdf download feature (on your list of promotions page)

and a free pdf to jpeg converter online tool whose owners plant trees depending on usage – wonderful!

If you then download the zip and cut/paste the pictures using Windows to your folder of choice.  Then of course just use the add media feature in good old WordPress et voila another posting in your blog!

P.S.  A few words about the person who provides this free conversion service – what a nice guy