DataPoint is absorbing TickerPoint. We already have our DataPoint plugin to connect text boxes, and other PowerPoint shapes to real-time data and data sources. With a normal text box, text is shown: left aligned, centered, or right aligned. But the text is placed inside the text box, and it remains there.
DataPoint integrated already text ticker or marquee functionality by adding an animation (fly in from left or right) on that text box. We calculate the duration of the text animation so that it is always smooth and with a constant speed, no matter the text length. But this has a disadvantage; a text box, and its text ticker animation, can only be used on one slide. Not overall slides of a slideshow, as some would want to see, like on television.
Next to DataPoint, we had our TickerPoint product. TickerPoint also allows text ticker and marquee functionality, but here on slide show level, and not on slide level alone. This was done by using a text box on the slide master. Then, when a TickerPoint slide show was running, we actually placed a layer on top of the running PowerPoint slide show.
So both products were able to display real-time information on text boxes. But over the years, both products grew up separately and got different data connectivity. The recent data providers that we added to DataPoint (e.g. Instagram, Salesforce, and many more) were not added to TickerPoint.
DataPoint Gets Slide Show Tickers
We took the effort to keep the great functionality of DataPoint with all of its connectivity, and integrated slide show text tickers to DataPoint. So with the release of the current and latest version of DataPoint, you can now declare a dynamic text box as text ticker as before. But now you also have another option to run the ticker over all slides of the slide show.
Once that you have marked this dynamic text box as slide show ticker, you can run the slide show. DataPoint will keep all linked shapes up to date. For example, news feeds like RSS will be updated every minute in the background. Once there is new information, it will be shown at the regular text box shape.
With slide show tickers, we only update the content of the ticker, at the end of the ticker animation. So when the last pixel of the current text flew off the screen, it can load the new text from the news feed and show the latest updated news.
But What About TickerPoint?
Good question. Now that we have TickerPoint functionality in DataPoint, and with all the DataPoint features that we already had, we decided to retire TickerPoint, and remove it from our product range.
Do you have a license of TickerPoint? No worries, we will still offer 2 years of maintenance on TickerPoint.
Do you want to upgrade your TickerPoint license to DataPoint? In case that you already have a DataPoint license, then just update your current DataPoint version to get in the new features. For users with TickerPoint but without DataPoint, we are offering to exchange your TickerPoint license for a DataPoint license by paying just the price difference. So look up your original order of TickerPoint and ask us to migrate that to DataPoint. No money is lost!
