I spent the week tweaking my presentation for SharePoint Saturday in New York, including timing my entire presentation, testing the presentation on a low resolution monitor (read my 17” Digital TV on my desk) and even working with a nifty remote control iPhone Application that let me read my slide deck notes and track my time.
How did this go over? It didn’t work. No matter how hard you plan something is going to pop up. What do you do? You improvise. You adapt. You Overcome.
I’d been really excited to do my presentation with my new MacBook Pro. When you’re doing events at that revolve around Microsoft Software you don’t see too many Macs, but hey I am, always have been, and always will be a rebel.
Keynote is Apple’s version of PowerPoint and it works well. It was really easy for me to drag in image, modify images inside of the presentation, and work with the screen capture movies I had created from my SharePoint VM running on the Mac.
What Failed? The stupid little minidisplay port to DVI adapter I bought to hook up to the presentation monitor or projector. Now most of the projectors out there in the world today are analog and still use the little 15 pin d-sub VGA adapter. No Fear, I had packed an adapter that came with one of my other monitors for just such a situation.
#FAIL
Take a look, see if you can figure out the difference. Here’s the output from the Apple minidisplay DVI adapter:
Pretty straight forward right? looks like a DVI to me.
Well here’s the adapter, and ALL of the DVI cables at the presentation facility looked just like this as well:
Do you see the difference? There are four mini male pins sticking out next to the big flat pin on the right-hand side. Do the female counterparts for these pins exist on the apple adapter? NOOO!
Who Knew? I mean heck I’m a geek right? I’m supposed to know these things. It’s one of those situations where I consider hooking your laptop up to an external monitor to be a commodity these days. It just happens and there’s no need to second guess it.
Am I that out of touch when it comes to hardware that I didn’t realize there were two types of DVI connectors our there? What’s up with this? Why won’t a simple damn DVI extension from a projector just work.
Needless to say it took about 5 minutes of reconfiguration. I exported the slide deck from Keynote to PowerPoint Format and stole @Cwheeler76’s laptop from the audience and did my presentation.
The conversion worked fairly well with two exceptions – I didn’t have all my nifty build actions. Build actions in Keynote are object transitions – how things move in and out of the screen. Instead of having my Fly-ins and Fly-Outs all the actions were reduced to simple “Appear” transitions in PowerPoint. No worries.
the second and biggest issue was that my slides containing all my screen capture movies were stored within the presentation as Apple QuickTime MOV files and PowerPoint didn’t display these.
Fortunately Dan Usher (@Usher) spent the first part of my presentation with my MacBook in the back row converting my movies over to AVI using a more windows friendly video codec. I was able to display my movies during the presentation however it wasn’t integrated into the slide deck and was done a bit out of order.
So what gives? Why doesn’t the MacBook Pro mini-display to DVI adapter have these 4 extra female ports? Bueller?