The One World Observatory is located at the One World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York, USA. This building was a tribute to the tragedy that happened at 9/11 (2001) with the Twin Towers. It recently opened in 2014, and Observatory itself opened mid 2015 and is located at the top floors of the One World Trade Center. This building is the tallest building in the United States.
The One World Observatory is one of the greatest attractions of New York. You get into the One World Trade Center and there you take the elevator up to the top floors. The ride in the elevator warms you up already as you get to see an animated video and view on how the city of New York evolved over the centuries. That elevator ride is over before you know it.
When arrive at the top floor, then you get to see a very spectacular view on Manhattan and New York.
But let’s get back to the entrance of the building. When you have tickets to visit the One World Observatory, then you enter the One World Trade Center at the ground floor, check in and go thru security. After that, your visit starts, and you will see a giant LED wall there where you see visitor KPIs at the top of the wall like:
- visitors from outside the U.S. this month
- visitors from the U.S.
- total visitors to one world trade center
- number of visitors this month
- miles traveled this month
Below those KPIs you see a map of the world, and then you see names of countries popping up on the map. The name of the countries corresponds to the visitors going thru the gate at that very moment.
That combination of dynamic and real-time information on the LED wall is something that we are going to make-over as a PowerPoint presentation, driven by our DataPoint plugin for real-time content.
Here is a picture of the real LED wall at the entrance.
Of course we have to simulate the data since we don’t have a possible connection to their visitor information. From the LED wall, you can clearly see that their info is coming from their ticketing database and checkin system. So when someone enters the building and uses his ticket, the counters are incremented, the visitor information is looked up in the ticketing database, and based on the country of origin, they show a country tag on the map.
Let simulate the counters as normal numbers that we store in an Excel file. DataPoint can connect to database systems as well as normal files like text and Excel files.
Then we use our DataPoint in PowerPoint to create a connection to the Excel file and read out the information from a selected data sheet and data range. And, important, we set the refresh rate to one second.
Now we have retrieved the information from the data source and we see a preview of it in PowerPoint.
You can use any normal text box of PowerPoint on your slide and link this to a cell of your Excel information. The nice thing here is that it is a normal text box that you can fully control with font, font size, bold, alignment etc. All normal PowerPoint settings. We just add the dynamic character to the text box by using DataPoint. Rest is the good & old PowerPoint.
And so we can bind several text boxes to the information that we have.
The country names that we see, can be a transparant image layer that we place on top of the world map, linked to a query or dataset that is giving back the list of countries of the last 5 or 10 visitors.
That is all we need to create a make-over of the One World Observatory LED Wall in PowerPoint. See slideshow below as video.
