[Nhcoll-l] Powerpoint for interactive kiosks

[Gary Shugart]

Hi All:   We recently had some kiosks with touch screens installed for interactive displays.  The software didn't work that well and creating, modifying, and correcting content involved third party software that we had to purchase separately followed multiple steps to get a file for the kiosks.  A workable, if not better alternative was Powerpoint.  We redid the content in Powerpoint with links for home, back, forward, etc. buttons and running these in kiosk mode (under Set up slide show) and found it to be a workable if not better alternative.   Little technical expertise beyond Powerpoint familiarity was needed to create and run these.  
The kiosks run on some stripped down Win7 machines with 2 GB ram with touch screen drivers that come with Win7.  An inexpensive laptop would run them with an auxiliary touchscreen.  
Once the content is created in Powerpoint, the kiosks only need Powerpoint viewer (free download) installed.  PP viewer has a default feature, apparently unchangeable, of return to first slide after 5 mins, which is what we wanted.  The full PP version could also be loaded but seems unnecessary.  
If anyone is interested, I can send an example PP showing how the links work etc.
One related aspect is that the PC version of Powerpoint has a batch upload of slides while the Mac version seems to lack this.  The batch upload simplified loading of the slides from the original kiosks into Powerpoint.
Gary ShugartSlater Museum of Natural HistoryUniversity of Puget SoundTacoma, WA




 		 	   		  
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