A cool trick to link videos in PowerPoint presentations
06 Jun 2010 - DaveThis is a hack to simulate relative links to videos, etc. in Powerpoint
Sales was creating a new PowerPoint presentation. This is what they wanted to do…
- Use links in the PowerPoint slide to separate, external videos.
- This keeps the Powerpoint file smaller.
- The link allows the presenter to skip showing the video at the time of the presentation.
- Sales folks will copy the folder containing the Powerpoint file & videos to different laptops as well as Flash drives. The folder will change.
- Simple enough for a sales person.
This hack depends mainly on two things. 1 – The little used MS-DOS command SUBST and 2 – The fact that Windows PCs do not use the B: drive.
Here is the Windows batch file: play.cmd You should create it in the same folder with the presentation.
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REM Check if B: drive is in use
IF EXIST B:\ GOTO B_DRIVE_EXISTS REM Map B: drive to current folder REM %CD% is the variable for the current folder SUBST B: "%CD%" REM Set B: as the current drive B: REM Open the PowerPoint file and wait until it closes call PowerPoint_File.ppt REM Jump to the end of the batch file GOTO DONE :B_DRIVE_EXISTS echo The B: drive is already in use - quitting :DONE REM Set C: as current drive C: REM Remove B: drive mappings SUBST /d B: echo done |
For a finishing touch we created a shortcut to play.cmd. This allows us to configure the MS-DOS window to start minimized and to change the default icon.
Thanks to Matt Harris, Omega Design‘s Technical Writer, for helping to develop this hack.