It is summer now at the northern hemisphere and in summer you can have severe weather conditions and thunderstorms. Most of the times, people get warned for this type of weather so that they can secure everything around the house.  Weather web sites are regularly checked for rain and storm zones.  When will it start? Will it come in our direction? When will it be safe again? Everyone has these kind of questions. The answer is in showing live doppler radar.

Luckily for us, there are many resources online that are available  to display these weather info, alerts and live doppler radar on information screens in their factory, school, pub, take-away restaurant etc. There are free resources on the internet where you can grab an image and use it in your presentation.  But very often, the quality of those images are poor and displays name of the website or source on it.  Maybe you don’t want that to be on your weather information screens, and you want to have high-resolution images without any brand or source on it? There are paid services where you can have access to a library of high-quality and related images.  DigiChief.com is such a service for the professionals. You pay a fee and you get access to weather information, weather maps and live doppler radar, but as well as stock quotes, traffic information, horoscopes and many more. Whatever you might need.

Let’s work out a sample weather presentation with a high quality live doppler radar image from DigiChief in combination with our DataPoint for PowerPoint add-on for real-time content.

When we open our personal DigiChief URL at a browser, then we see an image like this. Note that we have masked the URL here in this screenshot. Replace this with the URL of your own subscription.

Go to PowerPoint to create a new weather presentation or slideshow.

Use the Insert menu and click the Pictures button.

Enter the URL of that internet image in the File name text box and click the arrow from the Insert button, and choose Insert and Link from the menu options.

After that, the internet image will be inserted on your slide.  You can change the proportion of the image or make it full screen like here.

Click to open the DataPoint menu, and click the first button named Properties of the Presentation group.

Here you can verify that the option Refresh linked objects automatically is checked and you can verify or change the refresh interval.

Hit the OK button to close, and run the slide show.

The PowerPoint slideshow will now show the doppler weather image in real-time.  As soon as DigiChief is updating the image on their server, the image in your slideshow will be updated automatically.

Next, you can add other weather images or more information slides for your digital signage information screens.