PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint is widely used by teachers, especially in higher education. If you use PowerPoint in the classroom, you may want to make those slide shows available to your students online via Manhattan. The Lectures module is a great place for them.
The simplest way to make your PowerPoint slides available to your students is to simply attach the single PowerPoint file to the message. When someone clicks on a file name ending in *.ppt, his web browser is sent a signal meaning, "here comes a PowerPoint presentation!" As described in Opening attached files, your web browser can then automatically start PowerPoint to view the presentation.
Saving PowerPoint as HTML
Working with PowerPoint files within Manhattan is similar to working with Word in two respects. First, simply attaching the PowerPoint file as-is will work for you only if your students have PowerPoint or the free PowerPoint viewer (available from the Microsoft web site) installed on their computers. Second, as for a Word document, you can convert your PowerPoint presentations to HTML in order to relieve students of the need to purchase PowerPoint or install the free PowerPoint viewer.
The procedure for saving your presentation as HTML depends on the version of PowerPoint you are using. In PowerPoint 97 , you start the process by selecting Save as HTML from the File menu.
This starts a wizard that walks you through the process.
You'll find that you have the option of including the original PowerPoint presentation (that is, the original *.ppt file) as part of the web site you are creating. That will give your students the best of both worlds. They can view the presentation right in their web browsers, or they can download the full *.ppt file if they have access to PowerPoint or the PowerPoint viewer.
The PowerPoint Save as HTML procedure generates lots of files. There will be at least two files for each slide in your show. One is an HTML file with an *.htm extension. The second file type is an image file with either a *.jpg or a *.gif extension, depending on the options you selected during the process. A short slide show of 15 slides will generate over 30 files when converted to HTML. In order to get that many files attached as a web site to a Manhattan message, you'll have to 'zip' them all together into a single file.
Using WinZip to package web sites
Let's take the time to go over the process of zipping a web site for inclusion in a Manhattan message in some detail. The techniques covered here will work for any web site - not just a PowerPoint presentation. WinZip is available for free download from http://www.winzip.com. While the downloadable version doesn't expire, it is for trial purposes only. You are expected to purchase the software if you intend to use it beyond the trial period. (New versions of WinZip are frequently made available, so your screens may look different from the ones shown here.)
WinZip starts in one of two modes: Wizard or Classic. If your's starts in Wizard mode, switch to Classic by clicking the appropriate button on the startup screen.
Once in Classic mode, click New to create a new archive:
The next step is to indicate which files you want to add to the archive. The Add Files dialog box, shown next, is a busy place and it is important to get things right. Fortunately, all of the settings you need are usually the default settings:
There's a lot going on in the above screen. The most important step is to navigate to the folder that contains the files you want to zip together. In the above example, we made our way to the "discussion" folder, which holds the many files generated by PowerPoint when we converted our slide show to HTML format. Generally, all you need to do is leave all of the other settings just the way you see them above and click the Add with wildcards button.
You can be absolutely sure that the zipped version of your web site will NOT work on Manhattan if you put a check in the "Save extra folder info" or "Store filenames in 8.3 format" boxes! Also, leave the other checkboxes just as you see them in the above screen shot.
After clicking the "Add with wildcards" button, WinZip will work on creating the archive. When it is finished you'll get a screen like the one below.
WinZip has done its job and you can now exit the program. In this case, we've created a zip file named C:\zip_test.zip that contains all of the files (202 of them in this example!) that were generated by PowerPoint when the slide show was converted to HTML format.
We're ready to post this to the Lectures module of our classroom. Get to the New Memo screen of the Lectures module and attach the zip file as a web site:
After you click the Send Message button, the file will be sent to the Manhattan server. How long this takes depends on the size of your zip file and the speed of your Internet connection. When the zip file has finally arrived at the server, you'll get a screen like this:
Manhattan needs to know which of the many HTML files found in the zip file is the home page of your web site. For a PowerPoint file converted to HTML, the correct answer is 'index.htm', which happens to already be selected. You'll find a Click Here to Finish button at the very bottom of the web page. Click on it to complete the process. When opened, the message will look like this:
