How Use Live News in Presentations and Get More Attention

News is omnipresent. On your smartphone you can read your newspaper in a browser, subscribe to a RSS feed, watch your television news online and even get an automatic text message when something hot happens. On the radio you hear the news every hour. People read news online on their computers via browsers, Facebook, Twitter and email. Newspapers on paper however are losing importance. On top of these channels, you also see news propagation thru news channels on televisions at metro stations, coffee shops and more. People are more connected to news sources than ever before. The reason is obvious; people are curious for the latest news and want to follow live as news is generated. Often you see news combined with advertising and other communications because people are looking for animations, moving images, moving texts, or in general, data driven presentations. By offering live news, people also get to see the other signals and messages on the television screens. Microsoft PowerPoint presentations are often used for presenting but these presentations are static and you want to display real time news.

Link PowerPoint to RSS

There is a PowerPoint add-on called DataPoint that can make a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation dynamic. It can be used to display live news headlines in or on the presentation. DataPoint will update the content in real time as soon as new information is published at the news source. RSS or Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication is a standard web format to publish frequently updated information like news headlines and blog entries. The format of a RSS feed is XML or Extensible Markup Language. DataPoint technology allows the user to connect to a RSS feed and display its content – the news headlines – in a normal PowerPoint text box or table. DataPoint will update the content continuously with the latest news while the slide show is running. We will show how easy it is to bind news in a PowerPoint presentation. First of all, set up a connection to the favorite RSS feed, e.g. The New York Times with its URL http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/InternationalHome.xml. After the installation of the DataPoint add-on, start Microsoft PowerPoint and click the DataPoint menu option.

Click the List button of the Connections group.

And select the RSS node in the tree.

Connect to RSS feed

Then click Add connection and enter the URL of our choice: http://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/InternationalHome.xml.

Click OK to apply the connection.

Click on the node with ‘New RSS feed’ text so that the user can give a meaningful name and name it ‘The New York Times’.  Click Enter to commit the name change.

Assign text box to news article

Near the bottom of the form, see a preview of the news articles.  Start a new presentation and add a text box to the first slide and format the text box so that it can host the maximum length of a news headline.  In the DataPoint menu, click Text box.

Go to column Title and click OK. The content of the first (most recent) article published at The New York Times is now linked to this text box. Easier it cannot become.

Start the slide show and based on the current settings every 60 seconds DataPoint is retrieving an update on the RSS feed of our newspaper.  In case of an update DataPoint will write the new headline into the text box.

Stop the slide show because we are going to improve this presentation. This is a data driven presentation but, it looks static because it is displaying the first headline only. Click DataPoint and then Scrolling. Enable scrolling for the New York Times data connection. Leave the step size at 1 because we want to display the headlines one by one. Set the step time to 10 seconds to display each headline for 10 seconds in the slide show.

Click OK and click Set Up Slide Show in the Slide Show menu.  Select Browsed at a kiosk (full screen) as the show type and click OK.

Run slide show with live RSS feeds

Run the slide show. The slide show will show all headlines of the newspaper, one by one, each headline for 10 seconds long, continuously. If the user wants to add other text boxes to display e.g. the content of the article, or use a table to display multiple headlines or even use a text box as a news ticker. The user can download DataPoint from the PresentationPoint web site and the user can download this DataPoint enabled presentation of this article with the live updating news. A snapshot presentation is a generated presentation with the latest information, generated by DataPoint. This snapshot now contains static information only, as if it was displayed at the time that we created the data driven presentation. The user can preview this presentation.