Twitter Wall with PowerPoint

 

In this article, we will discuss how you can use our tools to create a Twitter wall.

We revised our Twitter data provider and it can now display a profile image and the featured image of a Tweet.

In this example, we will create a Twitter wall feed from a PowerPoint MVP. There are not that many PowerPoint MVP’s in the world. A PowerPoint MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional and it is a status that Microsoft gives to individuals that share their knowledge on a given Microsoft product to the world.

One of those Microsoft MVP’s of PowerPoint is Julie Terberg. She is a great designer and she has a special ‘hobby’ to publish a nice designed PowerPoint slide everyday on Twitter. Have a look at #SlideADayProject on Twitter and you will see astonishing designs. Her slides are typically recognizable by a great photography as a background image and then on top of it, some texts in harmony with the image.

So with the latest release of DataPoint, we updated the code of our Twitter data provider. Click to open the DataPoint menu from your PowerPoint menu or ribbon. Then click the List button of the Connections group.

 

From the list of data providers, scroll down and select the Twitter data provider, and click the Add query button to set up a Twitter connection.

At the Search Term enter a hashtag that you are looking for to filter the tweets you want to show on your Twitter wall. To select original tweets only, check the option Exclude retweets. In the event that you want to show a user profile image or when you want to download the featured image of the article or link, then check the corresponding options.

Download user profile images and download features images will prepare a local copy of the images. This option will slow down the processing a bit since more work is involved.

Finally set a refresh rate for automatic updates during the run of a slide show.

Click OK to close the form. You will see a preview of the Tweets at the data preview pane.

With the Twitter node selected, click the Rename button and set a proper name.

Insert a text box to your slide and click the Textbox button from the DataPoint menu or ribbon.

Leave the data connection to this default value (we only have one data connection yet) and set the column to From_User_Name of row number 1.

Click OK to save the new setting. Repeat the same action for other text boxes like e.g. the text of the Tweet and username.

Then open the Insert menu and insert a circle or oval shape.

Draw a perfect circle to host the user profile image (tip: use the Shift key).

Select the circle shape and click DataPoint, then Picture button.

Set the column to UserProfileImage and row number 1.

Click OK to commit and the image of the user profile of the first Tweet from your data is dynamically linked to this shape now.

Do the same to display the featured image of the url that was used in the Tweet.

Click OK and this slide looks a bit like a Tweet at the Twitter page. Next time you open this presentation, then an update of the Tweets will happen and when there is new information available, then the info on this slide will update automatically.

Optionally you can click to open the Scrolling options from the Slide group. Check the option to enable the data scrolling for our Tweets connection. Leave the step size to 1 and step time to 5 seconds. Click OK to close.

You can now run the slideshow and the data scrolling feature will display every Tweet of the data for 5 seconds and then move on to the next row.

You could also click the Snapshot button. This will create a new presentation with a Tweet per slide. This snapshot presentation can easily be sent to others that are not so lucky to have DataPoint on their system.

With this new Twitter data provider you can run events and exhibitions where you can create a Twitter wall to display the Tweets of your hashtag live and in real-time on your screens.