Learn how to Display Real-Time Tweets in PowerPoint

Terrorist attacks, disasters, shootings and so on, keeps us tied to the news and we watch as many news channels as possible. News papers, news websites, Facebook, Twitter, radio and so on. With the recent terrorist attacks, we probably all have the same behaviour. We want to hear and read what is happening, who did it, and moreover, why did they do it. We try to collect as much information as possible. Productivity on your work is gone. All we want to know is news.

This type of events brings us to the next article on our technology. How to bring hot news to your viewer with dynamic PowerPoint presentations linked to news and Twitter?

We already wrote an article on displaying RSS news in real-time on your information screen, by using Microsoft PowerPoint as the presentation tool and our DataPoint product, to display and scroll live news on your slides.

Now, we dig into the potential to display Twitter messages or Tweets on your PowerPoint information screens by using DataPoint.

There are many ways to use search on Twitter. You can find Tweets from yourself, friends, local businesses and everyone from well-known entertainers to global political leaders. By searching for topic keywords or hashtags (#), you can follow ongoing conversations about breaking news or personal interests.

To add a Twitter feed to your slides, click the DataPoint option of your PowerPoint ribbon menu. Then click the List button of the Connections group.

Go to the Twitter node and click the Add connection button.

As question, you enter your hashtag or keyword.

Count is the maximum number of entries returned by your search.

And the Interval is the refresh or requery rate, between two searches, for the automatic updates.

Your Twitter search connection is added to the Twitter node. You can rename the connection. You can already see a preview of the data returned by Twitter in your preview area. Optionally, add more Twitter connections and finally click OK to close.

Insert a text box on your slide and click DataPoint, Text box from the PowerPoint menu.

At the text box properties, choose your data connection, column and row number. The default data connection is fine here, since we only have one data connection set up in this article. As column choose Text. This column or field contains the Tweet text itself and set the row number to value 1 for the first Tweet.

Click OK and DataPoint will instruct this text box to always display the first Tweet text as the text box content. Whenever you refresh the DataPoint connections, or when you open the presentation later on, the first Tweet of your search, will be shown.

Click the Scrolling button of the Slide group at the DataPoint ribbon.

To automatically display all Tweets in this text box, after eachother, we can enable data scrolling. Click to enable the data scrolling for this Twitter connection and check and change the step time.

Now, when you run the slide show, or when you generate a snapshot presentation, then all Tweets will be shown in the same slide show. And when the slide show is running, the Tweets are refreshed automatically.