Wouldn’t it be nice to include live web pages in your PowerPoint slides, without starting a web browser? Or even better – show and control molecular structures without leaving the confines of your slides? In this edition of the Teaching Resource Information Service blog we will discuss how to do this and put some life into PowerPoint 2007 slides.

Install the LiveWeb add-in

1. Download the right add-in for your PowerPoint version. The instructions for PowerPoint 2003 are straight forward, but the instructions for the 2007 version are slightly different – that’s why I go through them in a bit more detail.
2. Launch PowerPoint 2007 and click on the Office button. In the pop-up menu click on the PowerPoint Options bar
   
3. A new pop-up window will open. Click on Add-ins
4. Again, a new pop-up window will open. At the bottom, click on Manage and go to the PowerPoint Add-Ins submenu. Click Go
5. And another pop-up window opens. Unless you have installed other add-ins, this window should be empty. Click on the Add new button – and – you guessed it – another pop-up opens. Navigate to the location where you installed the liveWeb add-in on your PC. Double-click the LiveWeb.ppam icon and press OK
6. Click on Close – and that’s the installation.

How to include a live web page in your PowerPoint persentation

1. Open a new slide in PowerPoint and click on the Add-Ins tab
2. In the top left-hand corner, click on Web Pages and you will be presented with the Wizard.
   
3. Click Next and copy the URL of the web page into the form. You must use the Ctrl-v command to past the URL – it does not work with left-click ‘Paste’ command.
   
4. Click on ‘Add and Next’ You can leave the settings in the next pop-up and simply click Next, Next and Finish. If everything went well you should see
   
5. Click on OK’and your web site will be included once you start your presentation. I always include the physical link in the slide, which is essential for those people, who don’t have the LiveWeb Add-in installed.
6. Once you start your presentation, you should see a warning (depending on your security settings). In order to use the LiveWeb Add-in you must enable the content. Click OK.
   
7. You then should see your live web page in the PowerPoint slide. You can click on the links and use the scroll-bar as if it was a real web browser.

I think this is a very useful little tool that allows me to stay within PowerPoint and not have to worry about closing windows, ending presentations etc. The only problem is that you need to have this add-in installed to look at the web pages. If you want to give your presentations to students or make them available to other people, who don’t have the add-in installed, they will only see the rather ugly ‘Windows’ icon (that’s why it is important to include the URL of the web page in your slide.

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Zotero is a very useful little tool to grab references from the Internet and use them in publications. This is a great add-in for Mozilla Firefox, which I found when I was a bit fed up with Endnote. Zotero allows you to import references directly from PubMed or other websites. The references are then stored in a special folder on your computer, but they can be easily transferred. You can directly import references into Word 2007 with the right plug-in. What is really very nice is that also Openoffice is supported by this plug-in. You therefore have the choice between Microsoft and open source software. In the following, I will show you where you can find the plug-in called ‘Zotero’, install it into your Firefox browser, get the plug-in for Word 2007 and download a library from PubMed.

Instaling  Zotero

1. Open the  Zotero web site with Firefox.
2. Click on the try out 2.0 beta (I found that the beta 2.0 version is fairly stable and hence suggest that you download this version). You will notice a yellow bar showing at the top of your browser window. Just click Allow.
3. A pop-up window will open. Simply click on Install now and Firefox will do the rest.
4. You will be asked to restart Firefox.
5. If everything went well you should see in the right hand bottom corner the Zotero label.
   
6. When you click on this label the screen will split, showing all imported references; we haven’t imported any references yet so therefore your library is still empty.

How to import references from PubMed

1. Open the PubMed web page with FireFox. Type your keywords in the search box; in this example I’ve typed ‘reactive oxygen’.
2. We will get a list of references, but of particular interest to me are only references 2 and 3.
3. To download these two references click on the little ‘envelope’ icon in the address bar. A new window will open which shows you all the references on this page.
   
4. Just simply check the two references we are interested in and click OK.
   
5. To see whether the references have been imported correctly click on the Zotero in the right-hand bottom corner of your browser window. You now should see in the split screen in your web browser the two references we just imported.
   
6. You now can create a whole library of references, which all will be stored in your Mozilla Firefox preference folder. By double-clicking on one of these references you will be immediately linked to the abstract of this reference in PubMed.
   Zotero quick start guide

Installing the Office 2007 plugin

1. Since we installed the Beta version of the Zotero add-in we need the latest Word 2007 plugin, which is 1.0b4. THIS IS IMPORTANT! The connection between Word 2007 and the 2.0 version of Zotero only works with this plug-in, not with any previous versions!!!! Scroll down to almost the end of the page from where you can download the correct installer file.
2. Assuming that you run a Windows machine click on Download Word for Windows Installer (139KB) and save the file so that you can find it again.
3. Simply click on the saved file icon and follow the instructions from the installer.
4. Open a new Word 2007 document and go to the Add-Ins toolbar
   
5. You should see the Zotero plug-in section. Clicking on the first icon will open a style window. Chose the style the suits your publication and click OK.
6. Another window with your references will open. Simply highlight the reference that you want to insert and click OK. The reference will be inserted at the cursor position, in the style that you have chosen before.
7. When you’re done click on the third icon: ‘Zotero Insert Bibliography’.
8. At the end of your document your reference will now be shown as:
   1. Li Q, Zhou Y, Yao C, Ma X, Wang L, Xu W, et al. Apoptosis caused by Hsp90 inhibitor geldanamycin in Leishmania donovani during promastigote-to-amastigote transformation stage [Internet]. Parasitol. Res. 2009 Aug 19;[cited 2009 Aug 20] Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19690889

I think this is an absolutely great tool, which probably makes ReferenceManager and Endnote more or less obsolete (at least for the average user).

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The focus of this blog is on how to put videos from the internet into your PowerPoint slides. This approach is becoming increasingly popular and rightly so. There is some good stuff out there (and also some really awful), so whenever you want to add a bit of interest to your lectures, why not have a look at YouTube or other sites. There is a good chance that people have already made some videos, which support your lectures. So really all you need to do is, find the good stuff, check whether this is what you want and then put it into your lecture slides. Obviously, I don’t know what you are looking for and whether it is suitable for your lectures, so I can’t help you with the first two issues. However, I can show you, how you can put YouTube videos into your slides.

There are two ways of dealing with this problem, both have advantages and disadvantages.

Download the video and then put it into your slide presentation. Obviously, you need to download a file, store it on your computer (and remember where you put it) and know how to get it to play in your presentation. Once you have downloaded the video, you can play it anywhere, even without a connection to the internet. Here the big disadvantage is that this process comprises a number of steps and, most importantly, don’t forget to acknowledge the authors!

Create a link from your PowerPoint slides to the video you want to show. This means that the video stays on the web and you just put the link into your presentation, so that the video is played within the slide. You don’t need to download anything. In order for this to work properly, you need to have a fast internet connection whenever you want to show the video.

Using YouTube video link add-in for PowerPoint

1. Download the YouTube Add-in
2. Install the add-on by following the instructions on the page
3. Open PowerPoint 2007 and click on Insert – you should see a new icon on the left-hand side
   
4. Clicking on this button will open a new dialog box – just click Next
5. In the next dialog box you need to enter the URL of your video (shortcut combination Ctrl + v)
   
6. Click Next
7. And Next again
8. In the next dialog box you can modify the size and the position of the video
9. Click Next and the Finish.
10. You will probably get a screen like this but if you click on the slide show icon and you will see your video
    
11. Click the Play button and voila! If everything went ok, your video should be playing without any problems.

What is good about the Add-on? It’s pretty straightforward to install and once you’ve got it, it’ll take you less than 30 seconds to put a video into your presentation.
What’s not so good about it? Using Ctrl + v in order to paste the URL into the text box is a bit annoying. The biggest problem is that the add-on only accepts URL’s linked to YouTube videos. I think that certainly needs improvement, since there is good stuff available from other sites (like Google videos).

Insert a link from your PowerPoint slides to the video you want to show

1. Simple paste the URL for your video into your slide.
2. To create a link, click on Insert in the toolbar and then the hyperlink icon.
3. A new dialog box will open.
4. Copy/paste the text of the link into the Address bar and click OK.
   
5. The text should now look like a proper link
6. When you start your slideshow and click on the link, the video will open in your web browser and start to play.

What is good about this method? Simple
What’s not so good about it? The disadvantage of this approach is that you have to leave your PowerPoint slideshow. Once you played the video you then have to go back to one of the many open windows, find the correct PowerPoint slide show and re-start it again. Surely not a big problem, if you have only one or two videos, but things get easily crammed and always start/stopping your slideshow is rather interrupting.

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