Take Control of Your iPod: Running Presentations Page 2 of 3

Your color-screen iPod can control PowerPoint and Keynote slides

Move the JPEGs to your iPod

Now that you’ve converted your slides to JPEG images, use iTunes to move your JPEGs to your iPod:

If your iPod is not attached to your Mac already, attach it now so that you can use the iPod preference pane in iTunes.

In iTunes, open the iPod preference pane and click Photos.

Select “Synchronize Photos From” to enable the capability of moving photos—or in this case, JPEGs of a presentation—to your iPod.

Choose the folder where you saved your presentation JPEGs from the Location pop-up menu.

Select the “Copy all photos” radio button.

Click the OK button at the bottom of the Photos pane.

iTunes optimizes the JPEG images and syncs them to your iPod.

Show the slideshow

Before you give your presentation, take a little time to prepare your slideshow settings:

Choose Photos: Slideshow Settings.

To set slideshows to display on a television or projector, set TV Out to “Ask” or “On.” Setting TV Out to “Ask” gives you the option of viewing the slideshow on your iPod or on a television each time you wish to view it.

Set the length of time each slide will be displayed by selecting Time Per Slide and then choosing a time.

Choose the music or narration to accompany the slideshow by selecting Music and choosing a playlist. If you’re a Mac user and you’re using iPhoto, you can choose “From iPhoto” to copy the iPhoto music setting. The music must be on the iPod in order to play from the iPod.

If you wish to show the slides in an endless loop, set Repeat to “On.”

Set transitions between slides by choosing Transitions and a transition type.

Finally, if you’re setting up to show slides on a television, set TV Signal to either “PAL” or “NTSC,” depending on which standard the television uses. NTSC is prevalent in the Americas, Pacific Basin, Caribbean, South Korea, and Japan, while PAL is the standard for the rest of the world.

Now that you’ve set your slideshow preferences and transferred the files to your color-screen iPod, use the iPod AV Cable to connect the iPod to a projector or a television. Navigate to Photos on the color iPod, and choose the first slide to project it to the screen.

iPod movies

The iPod with video gives you another option for delivering presentations because it can play movies, which you can make in Microsoft PowerPoint for Macintosh and in Keynote. These movies can be self-running presentations, complete with an audio soundtrack.

I describe how to convert PowerPoint or Keynote presentations into QuickTime format, and then to MPEG-4 video (M4V) format. I then explain how to move them to your iPod and deliver your presentation.

To prepare your presentation, you need the Pro version of QuickTime, not just QuickTime Player. It’s available from Apple for $29.99.

Note : Windows users cannot export their PowerPoint presentations to QuickTime movies. At this time, only PowerPoint for Macintosh (part of Office 2004) can export presentations in the QuickTime format.