5 Comments

1. 

   Michael on October 20, 2010 at 11:21 am

   Brother Richman, I visited the site with excitement to share with our storehouse manager but it states that the viewer needs to have PowerPoint 2007 viewer? These were posted to the church website as windows-based PowerPoint presentations? Absolutely amazing. In fact, it blows my mind that someone did not think through this. You eliminate every person using mac, linux, ipad or blackberry and force them back into the windows-only mindset? I thought the church IT department had dispensed with that mentality a long time ago. Why weren’t they just converted to PDF slides? Does Brother Dehlin know about this?

   Anything you can do to contact the person responsible and get them re-posted to the website as platform-neutral will be most helpful to those of us out here in the mission field. Thanks.

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2. 

   ldsWebguy (Larry Richman) on October 21, 2010 at 9:35 am

   Michael, I reviewed your concern with the Welfare Department, and the reason they didn’t deliver these materials in PDF is because they are interactive with audio files, and videos and interactive activities with pop-up windows—not something that you can convert to PDF slides. Until they can come up with a better solution, they felt comfortable distributing these as PowerPoint files, since their main audience is leaders and welfare staff training leaders, who are using Church-issued PCs. About 10% of Church members have Macs. Hopefully, there will be better solutions in the future.

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3. 

   Jacob on October 21, 2010 at 10:21 am

   I’m not sure about Powerpoint, but both OpenOffice Impress and Keynote have ways to export presentations to formats like Quicktime or Flash which would be much more portable than what I’m seeing there now.

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4. 

   Michael on October 21, 2010 at 2:48 pm

   Understandable. Thank you so much for taking the time to investigate that and report back. I will see what I can do to help the members with the presentations through the windows world.

   Keep up the good work Brother Richman. The changes to the websites and other new tools are exciting and are discussed here in Florida.

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5. 

   Michael on October 21, 2010 at 2:49 pm

   Thanks Jacob. I will try out the Keynote approach and see how it translates once I open them in Windows (they download as .exe files).

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