Powerpoint to DVD - no problem!

Yesterday I was too excited creating the blog to mention one very cool time saving thing that happened with my new Mac. I had a Powerpoint presentation that was created from slides for an organization I belong to. We got a new DVD/LCD Projector so the CD they created wasn't going to work with it unless we got a computer or something to display that file. I first opened the file in the 30 day trial edition of Microsoft Powerpoint. It had an export to movie, but it had just generic timing. I didn't want to have my presenter to have to press pause/play during their speech to get that to work. There had to be a better way.

I purchased the iWorks package with my Mac because I wanted the Pages software for the organization newsletter, but it also comes with Numbers (spreadsheet) and Keynote (presenation) software. I opened the Powerpoint document with Keynote and was amazed to see an "Export to iDVD" option. I thought surely this isn't going to be THAT easy. Well . . . it was. I was able to add in a little title and that to the marquee screen on the DVD and then burn a copy. I popped it in my DVD player and pressed play. Sure enough, the DVD would display one picture (originally a slide) and it would pause. Then I could hit the play button and go to the next one. How cool is that? I would have been beating my head against a wall for a weekend or more with a PC trying to do that . . . and then it wouldn't have looked half as cool and professional as what I ended up with.


I'm SOOOOO happy with little things like that. In time savings, it was at least a 8-16 hour project or more if on a PC but for the Mac I spent about 15 minutes on it and then let the Mac render and burn the DVD which took about an hour or so. (My last DVD project was a lot faster, but this one had so many menus that it rendered between every 6 slides if you wanted to jump to another scene.)