Instructions

Contents

• PowerPoint Twitter Feedback Slide
• PowerPoint Twitter AutoTweet
• PowerPoint Twitter Voting
• Internal Use
• PowerPoint Twitter Ticker Bar
• PowerPoint Twitter Mood Meter
• PowerPoint Crowd Meter
• PowerPoint Zoom Text
• Advanced Features
• Troubleshooting – see separate page
• Best Practice – see separate page
• FAQ – see separate page

If you don’t find what you’re looking for, please add a comment below!

PowerPoint Twitter Feedback Slide

Instructions

• Put the slide in presentation mode to view the feedback tool. If it does not appear, you may have to enable active content — see the troubleshooting page

• Enter a search term in the lower-left hand corner. Hit refresh to get latest tweets.
• Click on the people icons or individual tweets to go to the appropriate pages on Twitter (browser window opens).
• Click outside the Flash area in order to return control to PowerPoint / move to the next slide
• To use the slide, simply select it, and copy and paste it to your own presentation!

• Use the “page” option to see the history
• If you need more tweets per page, use the “alternate format”, above
• Clicking on the icon takes you to this instructions page
• Clicking on the icon opens a window that allows you to copy the HTML required to embed the widget in a web page

Options

• Set the refresh period in seconds. Zero = don’t refresh. NOTE: if you set this too low, you can trip Twitter’s rate limiting (which will result in error code #2032)
• Custom and moderated feeds: click on the “options” button to choose a custom RSS/Atom feed instead of the standard Twitter search feed. Sign up with a service such as TidyTweet.com in order to get powerful moderation options – you can easily filter out profanity, or approve each tweet that appears manually.

• You can use any RSS ATOM feed, such as an internal microblogging service like Status.net (see the “internal use” section below). If avatars aren’t available, they will be blank. You can choose to add the query parameters (e.g. “?q=keyword” added to the end of the URL)

• The tiny square in the top left lets you save and retrieve setups (all the choices you’ve made: keyword, options, etc). Typically, you’ll want to save a setup as a default. Choose “Save”, give the setup a name and save it. Then go back, choose “set default” and choose the setup you just created. This will then be the default when you open the tool (on your PC only)

PowerPoint Twitter AutoTweet

AutoTweet is a PowerPoint Add-in. As you present, any text in your note pages between the tags [twitter] and [/twitter] will automatically be tweeted, during your presentation. This uses Microsoft VBA (visual basic for applications), so is only supported in PowerPoint for Windows (the idea is based on similar functionality already available for Keynote on the Macintosh).

Because of authorization issues, I use a service called Supertweet.net — to use the plugin, you set up an account with them, then use those credentials in the box below:

Download the AutoTweet add-in (right-mouse click and “save as”) for PowerPoint 2007 or PowerPoint 2003 (apparently this version works best for PowerPoint 2010, too)

To install the Add-in for PowerPoint 2007, go to the Office button, choose “PowerPoint Options”, “Add-Ins”, “Manage / PowerPoint Add-Ins”, “Add New” and choose the AutoTweet.ppam file. A new item will appear in the Add-Ins Menu, in the “Menu Commands”, called “AutoTweet”. Clicking it will open the box above.

Checking the “Display success status of tweets” option will show a dialog box during the presentation, telling you whether the tweet was successful or not. It will close automatically after a second or so (the actual time may vary depending on the vagaries of Windows processing)

Note that there is no checking of the number of characters – if you use more than 140 characters, your update will automatically be truncated by the Twitter service (but the service also automatically shortens long URLs using the bit.ly service, giving you more characters).

Update Bar

An alternative way of doing updates is to include the update bar on a slide. Simply fill in the message to tweet and press “send tweet”. PowerPoint will prompt you to enter your username and password for twitter. Note that if you are using the PowerPoint 2007 version (slide deck ending in .pptx), you must have the file “powerpoint_twitter_update_status.swf” in the same directory as your presentation (it is in the .zip file you downloaded with the slide deck)

Note that the bar uses basic authentication – some users have reported getting Flash #2048 security errors, which may mean that PowerPoint’s security settings, or those of your computer, are stopping Flash from popping up the login box required to send the tweet.

PowerPoint Twitter Voting

Instructions

• Put the slide into presentation mode to see the PowerPoint Twitter voting tool — if it does not appear, you may have to change the trust center settings to enable Active Content (see the troubleshooting page)
• Choose the appropriate type of chart in the top right.
• Choose a unique voting string (e.g. “xcelsiustweet”). To vote, send a tweet with the chosen option as the first character, and with the voting string somewhere in the tweet — e.g. valid tweets:
  • 1 is the option I choose! #xcelsiustweet
  • 2XcelsiusTweet
• Or you can use the “quieter” option by starting with the text “@votebytweet” – this means that by default, your followers will not see the votes
  • @votebytweet 2 xcelsiustweet
  • @votebytweet 1 I’m voting using Twitter@ #xcelsiustweet
• Wait 30 seconds or so (depending on internet speed, twitter platform, etc.), then enter the chosen string into the box and press enter to see the results. Press refresh to see latest votes (Note: by default, only a maximum of 20 votes sent on the current date are counted — see options to set higher limits)
• To see the actual votes, click on “Total votes” – this will open a browser window with the votes
• The votes are automatically refreshed every 30 seconds by default, and duplicate votes are allowed

Options

• You can set the labels that appear as you put your mouse over the bars
• You can choose the colors for the text, bars, background, and the values on the bars. You can use HTML color names, or hexadecimal “0xFFFFFF” or decimal color codes, or RGB “(00,00,00)”.
• You can set the refresh time. Zero = no refresh. Note – setting this too low increased the chances you will trip Twitter rate limiting
• You can set how long votes are value. Zero = no time limit. This means you can reuse the same code from presentation to presentation. Because of time zone differences, it is best not to set it too close to a previous usage date.
• Clicking on the “show vote info” option shows the total number of votes, and the total number of tweets that contain the correct voting string, but were not valid votes
• These options have to be set each time you open the presentation — but can be done in advance before presenting.
• Clicking on the icon takes you to this instructions page
• Clicking on the embed icon brings up this window, where you can copy and paste the HTML required to embed the widget in a web page.

• The “Save” button lets you save and reuse sets of parameters. (all the choices you’ve made: keyword, options, etc). Typically, you’ll want to save a setup as a default. Choose “Save”, give the setup a name and save it. Then go back, choose “set default” and choose the setup you just created. This will then be the default when you open the tool (on your PC only).

Internal Use

What if you would like to use the PowerPoint Twitter Tools for an internal meeting, but don’t want to blast your critique of executive strategy over the internet?

One option is to use the open-source microblogging platform from Status.Net (motto: “Your life and your business are your own. Take control of your status.”). You can see an example of this product in action at www.identi.ca

To use the product, you’d need to install a server inside your organization, invite your employees to register, and then use a custom feed such as:

http://yourinternalserver:1088/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/thetagyouwanttofollow.atom

The feedback slides, the voting tool, and the ticker bar all support the use of custom feeds. Unfortunately, some of the status.net feeds don’t include the avatars link, so you only get the text updates using this method (e.g. see the screen shot below using the public feed for the “enterprise20” tag from identi.ca: http://identi.ca/api/statusnet/tags/timeline/enterprise20.atom).

PowerPoint Twitter Ticker Bar

Instructions

• Put the slide into presentation mode to see the ticker bar at the bottom of the screen — if the bar does not appear, you may have to change the trust center settings to enable Active Content (see section on trouble-shooting)
• Use the left-hand button to turn the bar on or off. Type in the text you want to search for (e.g. “timoelliott”) and press Enter.

• Click outside the bar area in order to give control back to PowerPoint/move to next slide, etc.

Background information

• The bar shows the ten latest tweets containing the chosen search term
• Status is maintained across slides — i.e. as you move to the next slide, the scrolling doesn’t restart at the beginning (in order for this to happen, the bar is in the slide master, not in each slide — see “advanced”)
• The twitter feed refreshes each time the text is changed, and then every 60 seconds afterwards.
• The size and speed of the text is a compromise. If it were bigger, more people could see it, but it’s harder for the presenter to easily see a complete “tweet” (larger text means fewer letters across the screen) and so react to the feedback.
• If there are more than around 7 messages/minute, some messages will not be shown (but this is desired behavior, so that a backlog doesn’t build up, which would mean viewing tweets that are increasingly behind what you’re actually showing)

Advanced Features

• To link to/open one of the messages shown in the ticker, click on the text to select it, then click on the “>” button — a new browser window will open with the twitter message

• Clicking on the SAP logo will take you to the SAP.com web page for Xcelsius, the technology used to design these tools
• Clicking on the “by timo.elliott@sap.com” link takes you to these pages on thewww.sapweb20.com web site.

• Clicking on the icon takes you to this instructions page
• Clicking on this icon opens a window that allows you to copy the HTML required to embed the widget in a web page
• To “clear” the bar, delete the search text and press enter.
• If the search string is invalid (e.g. “ “), you may get an error message that is not fully displayed because of the lack of space — click on the box and press the “Enter” key to make it go away

Copying the Bar to your own template

• In order to ensure that you can keep the bar available when you move from slide to slide, it needs to be copied to the slide master of your presentation, rather than directly into a slide.
• Copy the bar from the slide, then go to your slide deck and open the slide master: hold down the Shift key and click on the left-most button below (appears in the lower left of the screen) to open the master slide templates

• Select the correct high-level master slide (you may have to scroll up a bit)

• Duplicate your slide master by pressing CTRL-D, and rename it something like “slide master with twitter bar”

• Paste the bar into the bottom of the new master slide
• Apply the alternate master to the slides where you want the bar to appear (see next section)

Making the Bar Appear Only on Some Slides: Choosing the Alternate Master Slide

• To determine which master is used for which slides, select the slides you want to change, go to Slides/layout, and choose either your original slide master or the new alternate (in the PowerPoint tools deck, they are called “SAP_BOBJ_Template_ab_2009” and “SAP_BOBJ_Template_ab_2009 with Twitter bar”.

PowerPoint Twitter Mood Meter

Instructions

• This tool is a variation on the twitter voting. The audience can tweet either “@votebytweet warmer myuniqueid” or “@votebytweet colder myuniqueid” and the indicator in the bar will move to the right (warmer) or to the left (colder). The bar shows the average of the last tweets (10 by default).
• Usage example: at the start of a presentation, you ask the audience how they feel about a particular topic (e.g. “do you think SAP is an innovative company?”. Then the audience can tweet during the presentation if they agree/disagree, and the bar shows the current “mood”
• As with the ticker bar, this should be installed in the powerpoint slide master if you want to use it across slides. See http://www.sapweb20.com/blog/powerpoint-twitter-tools/instructions for more details

PowerPoint Crowd Meter

The Crowd Meter doesn’t use Twitter. It displays the level of noise in the room, using your computer’s microphone. You can use it to ask the crowd to cheer for a candidate, best presentation, etc.

• Default security settings do not allow Adobe Flash to access your microphone volume. The Adobe Flash settings window will come up by default when you first use the widget. Click “allow”

• The widget shows the current microphone level, as well as the maximum volume over the previous ten seconds.
• Note there’s a delay of a second or two between making a noise and the bars/numbers appearing on the screen. Using an external microphone may increase the accuracy of the noise monitoring.
• Clicking on the icon takes you to this instructions page
• Clicking on the embed icon brings up this window, where you can copy and paste the HTML required to embed the widget in a web page.

PowerPoint Zoom Text

This tool doesn’t connect directly to twitter just yet, but it’s a nice graphic effect that you can customize with your own words. Here’s a glimpse of what it looks like (this text moves towards the viewer, and you can click on values to move them to the center). There are two different methods. The first allows the user to update the text themselves, but is a little less aesthetically pleasing:

The second has to be set using variables:

Advanced Features

The tools support the use of Flash Variables to preload the options, making it easier to use them in standalone situations.

Do any of these apply to you?

• You’re tired of entering the same keyword values each time you open the presentation?
• You have a technically-challenged manager, and you need to set the values in advance?
• You’re scared that the audience might – gasp — see the mouse on the screen? (this is a surprisingly common fear among conference organizers)
• You’d like to set up a conference template for others to uses

The answer to all these is to use the setup variables, now supported by most of the tools. To set variables in advance, simple right-click the tool in PowerPoint and add them to the end of the movie name. Here’s a quick list of the variables available:

• “keyword=yoursearchterm” (use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)
• “locked=1” hides the bar for the search term, effectively “locking” it to whatever you’ve pre-set
• “refreshrate=30” to set the refresh rate. Zero = no refresh.
• “votes=10” to set the maximum number of votes
• “customfeed=1” to enable a custom feed
• “customfeedurl=http://yourcustomfeedurl” to set the value of the custom feed
• “days=4” increases the number of days votes are valid for. Zero = unlimited.
• “choice1=YourChoiceText” for the hover-over text on the voting charts (choice1 through choice6, as appropriate – and use %20 instead of a space if you need two words)
• “chartchoice=1” is pie chart, 2-6 is 2 to 6 choices
• backgroundcolor, textcolor, barcolor, valuescolor – all set colors, e.g. “barcolor=white”
• “slideformat=2″ to start up the feedback slide in the “alternate” format

For example, if you wanted to set up the feedback slide so that it automatically opened with a search for the tag “#sap”, you can simply right-mouse click on the movie, and add “?keyword=#sap” to the end of the “Movie” Parameter (note that in theory you should use URLencoding of values, e.g. %23 instead of #, but it seems to work anyway)

And here’s an example of the text to add in order to get a locked-down, custom moderated feed:
“?locked=1&customfeed=1&customfeedurl=http://timoelliott.tidytweet.com/SAPWeb20.atom”

Here’s the result – note that the search term can no longer be changed:

Troubleshooting

See the troubleshooting page

Best Practice

See the best practice page

Frequently Asked Questions

See the FAQ page

IN NO EVENT WILL SAP OR TIMO ELLIOTT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, LOSS OF USE OR LOST BUSINESS, REVENUE, OR GOODWILL) ARISING IN CONNECTION WITH THESE PROTOTYPES AND/OR THE USE THEREOF, UNDER ANY THEORY OF TORT, CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY OR NEGLIGENCE, EVEN IF SAP OR TIMO ELLIOTT HAS BEEN ADVISED, KNEW OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. IN NO EVENT SHALL ANY DAMAGES WHICH MAY BE ASSESSED UPON SAP OR TIMO ELLIOTT FOR ANY REASON.