ITS Technology Tips

If you’d like to include a You Tube clip as part of your PowerPoint presentation,  you can easily embed a video to play directly within your slideshow. Follow these steps to embed a You Tube video in PowerPoint 2007:

1. Go to the Developer tab
2. If you don’t see the Developer tab, click the Microsoft Office Button and select PowerPoint Options. Click Popular, then select the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon check box.
3. In the Controls box, click on More Controls ( hammer and wrench button)
   
4. Select Shockwave Flash Object from the list
5. Draw a box on the slide where you want the video
6. Right click on the box and select Properties
7. In the Movie line, enter the YouTube video’s URL but you must change the watch?v= to v/ in the URL
8. You won’t see the video until you run the slide show once

If you have pictures that you’d like to share, instead of emailing individual photos or posting many images to your Blackboard course, consider creating a movie slideshow. With QuickTime Pro software, you can easily create a movie slideshow from a folder of images.   While you may have the free QuickTime Player already installed on your computer, updating to QuickTime Pro ($29.99/Mac or PC) will enable you to create a nice-looking movie presentation of your photos.

Learn how to create a slideshow movie in QuickTime in just a few steps:  http://images.apple.com/quicktime/pdf/QuickTime7_User_Guide.pdf

Quick Tip

Try saving your PowerPoint presentation as JPEG images.  If you have a large PowerPoint file with many images, saving your presentation as JPEG images, then creating a slideshow movie from the PowerPoint JPEGs will significantly reduce the size.  Additionally, the movie file will be read-only and will display nicely on a Web page or Blackboard course page.

Technology Tips receives questions about technology that are sent to training@luc.edu. Instructors and students also email blackboard@luc.edu with Blackboard related questions. We thought it would be a good idea to start compiling some of these questions and occasionally share the answers in our weekly Tech Tips. 

 Q:  I want to place my PowerPoint lectures on my Blackboard site.   I want my students to be able to download them, but I don’t want them to be able to change the content.  How can I prepare my PowerPoint presentation so it can’t be modified?  

A: Even if you are not uploading PowerPoint presentations to Blackboard, you may be interested in learning how to password protect Office documents.   Why would you care about this tech tip if you aren’t using Blackboard?  You might want to share a draft of a paper or presentation you are working on and don’t want any one to make any changes to your handiwork, whether it is accidental or intentional.   A popular way to create documents that people can’t easily change is to convert them to PDF format using Adobe Acrobat or free PDF software (Cute PDF, PDF995).  However, there are reasons why you might want to make the original document available instead of converting it to PDF.  For example, saving the original slideshow gives people the opportunity to view multimedia you have in the presentation.  It also gives them some choice on how they print and view the slides.   However, we aren’t discounting all the benefits of PDFs, so don’t forget about them entirely.  They’re great for preserving formatting and compressing larger files.   It’s very simple to password protect your PowerPoint presentation. You can also password protect your Word documents using the same steps.  

1. Go to Tools > Options.  Click on the Security tab.
2. To prevent unauthorized modification, type in a password under “Password to modify,” then select OK.   
3. Enter a password.  Re-enter your password to confirm.  Select OK.
4. Go to File > Save and close PowerPoint.
5. The ” Password to modify” will allow anyone to open a “read-only” copy of your presentation.  This means no one can make any changes to your documentation unless they know the password.
6. Note: You can go the extra step and require that people enter a password to OPEN the document.  Simply enter a password under the “Password to confirm” dialog box.  But gee, what top secret document are you working on?
7. The next time you open the document, the dialog box will say “Enter password to modify, or open read-only.” You should instruct the students or colleagues who have access to your document to select “Open read only” when they open your document to prevent confusion.
8. To remove password protection, simply go back to Tools > Options and the Security Tab and remove the passwords.

These instructions apply to Microsoft Office 2003; if you are using Office 2007 the steps will differ.  See Microsoft’s online demo to learn how to password your Office 2007 documents.