Creating Presentations

Within Cumulus you can create PowerPoint presentations from cataloged PowerPoint assets (individual slides or entire presentations), image assets and previews of other asset formats.

Cumulus offers two Asset Processor modules for creating presentations. Both enable the user to create PowerPoint presentations from selected PowerPoint assets and image assets within Cumulus. They differ in the format of the presentation they create:

• The MS PowerPoint Asset Processor creates presentations in PowerPoint 97-2003 format (*.ppt). It requires a Microsoft PowerPoint installation on the computer where you want to make use of it (e.g. Cumulus Client.)

• The Office Open XML Presentation Asset Processor creates presentations in Office PowerPoint 2007 format (*.pptx and *.ppsx).

When creating a new presentation with Cumulus, both Asset Processors offer a range of parameters to be defined. (For details, see “Office Open XML Presentation Processor Parameters” , and “MS PowerPoint Asset Processor Parameters”.)

If your selection of assets includes presentations, you can define to exclude them, to include the entire presentations or just the first slides.

If your selection of assets includes images, each image is placed on a separate slide. You can define the area where they will be placed and determine where they should be aligned. The images can be scaled down or up to fit this area. If you do not activate a scale option, only large images will be scaled down to fit on the slide, according to the determined alignment. You can also have the images processed before they are included in the presentation. If you enable this option, the Parameters button lets you select the processing parameters. For details on the available parameters, see “Converting Image Assets” .

You can use any asset format to be included as an image in a presentation if a Cumulus Filter module is available that provides a preview.

You can create presentations by employing the Convert menu command or by including the Asset Processor in a Cumulus Asset Action. (For information on how to include an Asset Processor in an Asset Action, see “Cumulus Asset Actions” .) The following section describe how to create presentations with the Convert menu command.