Converting Powerpoint Slideshows to Flash with Gmail

Talk about stress!

I was set to give a corporate coaches clinic the other day, and the worst thing happened to me: my USB thumb/flash drive memory stick got corrupted!

In it, I had kept my PowerPoint slide, as well as a Powerpoint show slide in case the computer at the clinic didn’t have PowerPoint installed.

With both files gone, I was more nervous than running a 400 meters, and believe me, I get pretty nervous for that event!

Luckily, I had emailed myself the presentation to my Gmail account the night before, which has almost 3 GB of disk storage. As well, the computer at the clinic had an Internet connection. It didn’t matter if it had Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Login and open to your Gmail, then choose View as Slideshow on the bottom of the email.

Gmail converts every slide of your Powerpoint presentation to a Flash (*.SWF) file. You can advance the slides one by one, or go to the top-right corner and jump directly to the slide number. No other software is required.

For those who use Gmail, it also views Microsoft Word and Excel files without Microsoft software pre-loaded on the computer.

Talk about saving the day!

And the presentation went well, thanks for asking.