page static_html.xsl pptprep

Preparation Utility

The PrepUtil is implemented as a command-line WSH script. It implements a folderwalker interface to traverse the folders beneath a root folder, looking for PPT files. The operation(s) performed upon the files found depends on the operation argument.

Presentation Decomposer

This is the main purpose of the PrepUtil. Breaking up presentation into their atomic parts allows these parts to be used as content and template components for new presentations. Decomposed slides and templates are placed in a repository along with slide metadata.

Presentation Optimizer

Many PowerPoint users have grown to accept multi-metabyte PPT files - often not realizing that the uncompressed bitmap graphics within these presentations is making the files unnecessarily large. The PrepUtil can be run with an argument which will attempt to optimize the graphics within the presentations encountered during folder tree traversal. The optimized presentation is often one tenth the size of the original file. Even independent of the Generation Utility, it makes sense to run the optimizer against the file system where your PPTs reside. Smaller presentations have many advantages including

• faster loads
• smaller emails
• lower bandwidth consumption
• greatly improved performance of the Generation Utility

The fourth point warrants further discussion. The generation utility is a browser-based utility. But the slides which comprise a generated presentation must still be delivered to the desktop computer. Smaller PPT files means smaller slides. This allows the generator to run much faster, resulting in a better user experience.

Thumbnail Generator

To support browser-based user review and selection of slides to add to their presentation, the toolkit supports the creation of thumbnail images of presentations decomposed into the slide repository. The Thumbnail generator can be configured to generate small, medium, large, or custom-sized slide images.