Beyond Bullets

My daughter Jessica did this amazing project for school. It was part of her summer work. It is due today, her first day back at school.

The project was to study the Little Rock Nine, the nine african american kids who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock in 1957.

She built this amazing Powerpoint presentation that took pictures (which she found on the Internet) and told the story of what happened then and what these 9 people did with their lives and what they are doing today. It was an impressive piece of work and she used all the best of Powerpoint with builds, transitions, etc. I’ll have to hire her to do my Powerpoint work in the future since I have no idea how to do half the stuff she did.

But when it came to audio, she was stumped. She found this great song by Reba McIntyre called Little Rock which she wanted to use as the backing track for the entire slide show. Sounds easy, right? It’s not.

We wasted about an hour and a half trying everything but the slides wouldn’t keep changing when we inserted the audio file.

So then I went into email mode. I emailed five friends and family who do a lot of Powerpoint work. Most said it couldn’t be done. One of my friends had the right answer but it was a Mac answer and I didn’t really understand it.

But Matt suggested I go to Beyond Bullets, a great blog all about Powerpoint written by Cliff Atkinson. I did that, emailed Cliff, and he got back to me and told us exactly what to do.

The result is joy in the wilson household. Jessica’s presentation sings and I get to be the hero who got it to do that.

Thanks Cliff and also to all my friends and family who helped out along the way.