----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Elmers"
Subject: [PCSOFT] Slide show program


> I'm in need of a program that will allow me to take pictures of my daughter
> and future son-in-law and make a slide show. I want to be able to put the
> show on a CD and show it at their reception. I would like to be able to have
> music in the background (also on the CD) and have different fade in and out
> of the pictures.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions as to a good software program that can help
> me do this?
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-------------------------------

Robert,

Microsoft's PowerPoint program was designed to do exactly what you want, but it's a bit cumbersome
to use. If you have time to learn it, you'll find all kinds of interesting features that allow
excellent manipulation of pictures, sounds, text, clipart, etc. If you have MS Office 97, you may
already have PowerPoint installed. ( I think Office 2000 has PowerPoint as well ). The best thing I
found with PowerPoint was that, once my slideshow was completed, it was only a matter of saving it
to a floppy disk or emailing it to the machine I wanted to run it from. However, running it from the
floppy was slower than running it from the hard drive, but that was a few years ago on a slow PC.
Although I haven't tried it recently, I'm sure that with today's faster machines and CD-ROM drives
using direct memory access, running it from a CD should be quite adequate. And even with the
relatively small capacity of a floppy, I was able to put together a fairly lengthy show using about
30 JPEG's. So a single CD would likely be far more than enough for your needs.

As for the presentation, you'll need a projection machine similar to the old slide projectors, which
connects to the PC. I don't know how common they are, but you may be able to rent one somewhere. In
the old days, the PC had to actually have the entire PowerPoint program installed in order to run a
presentation, but today there are PowerPoint viewer programs for that purpose. I don't have a link
for one, but any search engine will find a PowerPoint viewer.

As an alternative, it may also be possible to run it from a machine with TV Out capability and a big
screen TV - perhaps someone else could advise on this alternative.

There may be other more user-friendly programs available today, but since I've used PowerPoint for a
couple of slideshows I did in college, I thought it was worth a mention. I'd be happy to put
together a small demo which you could burn to a CD to try. You could also do a search for files with
a .PPS extension on your drives or the net. Microsoft probably has demos you could download. hth

Al Thompson

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