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Take Control of Your iPod: Running Presentations

Your color-screen iPod can control PowerPoint and Keynote slides

Editor’s Note: The following article is an excerpt from Take Control of Your iPod: Beyond the Music, a $10 electronic book available for download from TidBits Electronic Publishing. The book is on sale for 50-percent off through December 26, 2005.

Although its capabilities are limited compared to a laptop, it is possible to use a full-sized, color-screen iPod to run presentations developed in PowerPoint on Windows or Macintosh, or Keynote on the Mac. You’ll need to attach the iPod to a projector or a TV so that everyone can see the presentation, and to speakers if you have a soundtrack or narration to go with the presentation. What you can do—and what you might want do—depends on a few factors:

• If you have an iPod with video, it will play a movie or a slideshow. Other color iPods will play only slideshows. The nano is color, but—as of this writing, it can’t be used for presentations, because there is no way to connect it to a projector or other video device

• If you have a Macintosh and the $29.99 QuickTime Pro, you can export movies. If you don’t have QuickTime Pro on your Mac, you can export only slideshows. If you use Windows, you can only export slideshows.

Since your iPod is no bigger than most projector “clickers” and you simply push the Forward button to go to the next slide or start a movie, the capability of the color iPods to display presentations comes in very handy when you travel for business. Would you rather carry a 5- to 8-pound laptop, or just bring your iPod? Not only can you use it to show your presentation, but you can also entertain yourself with your music, photo, and video library.

All good presenters know to be prepared, so even if you plan to drive your presentation from a computer, having it on your iPod can be a lifesaver if the computer has problems.

I recommend that you give it a try if you have a color iPod, as you may be pleasantly surprised by the results. It’s also worth a shot to see if you can get your company to foot the bill for an iPod with video.

Tip: Before you make a public presentation, see how your slideshow or movie looks when projected from your iPod. Some slides and movies may look blocky when projected on a large screen so I suggest a test run with your iPod and the projector or TV you’ll be using.

iPod slideshows

To run a slideshow on an iPod, you first convert it to a series of JPEG-formatted images. Then, you move those images to the iPod in a specific way. Let’s begin with the steps for converting to JPEG:

If you use PowerPoint:

In PowerPoint, open your presentation and choose File: Save As.

In the Save dialog, from the Format pop-up menu, choose “JPEG” as the file format. Then, click the Save button.

Depending on your version of PowerPoint, you might be asked if you want to export every slide in the presentation or just the current slide. Provided that you want to move the entire presentation, click the Every Slide button.

PowerPoint exports the slides to wherever you saved them, with one JPEG file for each slide.

If you use Keynote:

( Note : For this technique to work, you need the Pro version of QuickTime, not just QuickTime Player. It’s available from Apple for $29.99.)

In Keynote, open your presentation and choose File: Export.

Choose “QuickTime” from the available choices, and click the Next button.

In the resulting dialog, for Playback Control, choose “Interactive Slideshow.” Then, click Export.

The slides are saved into a QuickTime movie. Next, you need to convert the QuickTime movie into a set of JPEGs.

Open the movie you just created in QuickTime and choose File: Export.

From the Export pop-up menu at the bottom of the dialog, choose Movie to Image Sequence.

Click the Options button. Choose JPEG as the file format, and then enter

(the number one) into the frames-per-second field.

Click OK.