The Blackboard User group discussion forum came up with a product which I
am testing called IMPATICA for Powerpoint. This is one of two solutions to
use
The first is of course to save the powerpoint file to HTML file (making
sure that you uncheck the "put associated files in a seperate folder"
option in the publish area. Then you zip up all these files and send them
to blackboard with the instruction to unpack the file. This does not
physically reduce the size of the files in total - in fact it increases
slightly - but from the user end they view the slide show in their IE
browser together with most of the transitions etc but it is downloaded a
page at a time which means they dont have to wait for the whole show to
download)
Impatica for Powerpoint (www.impatica.com) is fairly expensive at almost
£300 but what you do with this is to simply drop the powerpoint slide show
onto the impatica icon and select translate and save the result to a
suitable folder. This puts your slide show into three files - an html
page, a special java viewer plus the impaticised file itself. Again you
save these three files to a zip and send them to blackboard to unpack. The
resultant files are about 50% smaller than the Powerpoint one.
Impatica has some documented limititations - it cannot handle ALL the
transitions, it cannot display "wordart" items and any URL links on slides
are not active. This means you need to take a little more care when
creating - on the plus side it will display in ANY java enabled browser
without the need to download any plug ins
There is a watermarked evaluation on their website.
Clive Richards
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