A nice and informative PowerPoint presentation we made a little smaller and safer.
A lovely PowerPoint presentation arrived in our Inbox (thanks Peter!) which we’ve decided to share with Office-Watch.com readers.
It’s a series of day and night photos of Earth from space taken by Sunita Williams called ‘Blue Beauty’.
Aside from the great photos there are also annotated versions making it easier to find cities.
UPDATE: We’re obliged to Richard C for a link to this article about the presentation. It confirms some nagging doubts we had about some of the slides which didn’t quite seem right for shuttle/ISS images: “about half of the images were NOT taken by either of those methods, but instead appear to be simulations generated using a computer graphics package“. The two shots on the first slide aren’t from the shuttle nor space station which orbit too low for ‘whole earth’ images. In any event, they are nice photos. If you want to see absolutely genuine earth images head to http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/ or http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/efs/
This presentation arrived as a .PPS file which can play in any version of PowerPoint or PowerPoint viewer however it’s not the best way to send a Powerpoint presentation to automatically play.
The Office 2007/2010 version of .pps is .PPSX and it has two advantages:
- Smaller file size (1.5MB vs 1.9MB in this case)
- Greater safety. The ‘X’ versions of Office 2007/2010 files (.docx, xlsx etc) won’t run any macros and usually can’t even save a macro. This means you can open a .pptx file without unduly worrying about a virus getting onto your computer.
Whenever sending a file it’s best to send in the ‘X’ macro-free formats where possible.
Converting a .pps into a .ppsx is easy. Open PowerPoint 2007 or PowerPoint 2010 then open the .pps file (double-clicking on a .pps will play the presentation not open it in PowerPoint). Once open in PowerPoint, use Save As to save in the ‘PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx)’ format.
We’re making the presentation available in the .PPTX format for our readers to enjoy.
Download from here – Pictures_Of_Earth.ppsx 1,577kb
Right-click to save the file to your computer, the menu details depend on your browser.
As always, you should check the incoming file for viruses or other nasties. Naturally, we’ve checked the file but you should never take anyone’s word for it – not even us! Any decent anti-virus software should automatically check the file as it is saved to your computer or there’ll be an option to scan individual file/s.
This isn’t something we regularly do but this particular presentation caught our eye. The presentation is entirely unchanged except for the file format. We gratefully acknowledge the original makers and especially Astronaut Williams for their work.
