What is an MVP?

Steve Rindsberg is the founder and president of RDP, based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Steve's gargantuan and growing PowerPoint FAQ, celebrated in myth and legend, has its origins back in the pre-Web days of Microsoft Office 97, when MVPs provided online support on CompuServe®.

In a short interview, Steve told Microsoft a bit about himself, the man behind the indefatigable and endlessly helpful newsgroup postings, and about the finer points of his experiences with Microsoft Office PowerPoint® over the years.

Why PowerPoint?   "Through college in the '70s, I worked for a commercial photographer. I graduated with a degree in political science and thought about going to law school, but that's what everyone was doing who didn't know what to do next, so I decided to stick with photography.

"Photography led to producing multi-image slide shows, which led to computer graphics, which led to running a slide-imaging service bureau. That required specialized software, which led me to learn Microsoft Visual Basic® at about the time PowerPoint came along. I was invited to become an MVP in 1995."

Most common customer question?   "My sound and movies work fine on my PC, but they break when I move them to another one. How can I use my sound and movies on another machine?"

(The answer: Movies are always linked in PowerPoint. To avoid linking problems:

1. Choose (or create) the folder where you want to store your presentation and movies/sounds.
2. Save your presentation to that folder.
3. Copy sound and movie files to the same folder.
4. Insert the sounds and movies into your presentation from that folder.

   When you move the PPT file to another computer, be sure to move all the movie and sound files, too. As long as you put them in the same folder as the PPT file, the links will usually not break.)

Best source of add-in ideas?   "The PowerPoint 2003 Newsgroups."

Best evolution of an add-in story?   "I had the good fortune to work with Tom Wlodkowski as he gave a presentation on making the Web accessible to people with disabilities. It hit me that with a few adjustments, I could write an add-in that could generate HTML that was totally accessible to people like Tom. Tom is blind and uses a screen reader to operate his computer and surf the Net.

"I was already using another HTML-making application I'd written (called Friday) to maintain the PowerPoint FAQ, and I started thinking about how I could use some of Friday's tricks to make HTML from PowerPoint.

"The goals were to give the user total control over what appeared in the HTML, to make it possible for the user to produce HTML that's compatible with any browser out there or, if it's more appropriate for the user's needs, to produce HTML that fully exercises the abilities of a particular browser. Either way, it would be the user's choice.

"Well, it turned out to be more than a few adjustments, and PPT2HTML ended up using a radically different approach to making HTML than Friday does, but in the end, it turned into what I think is a very flexible tool for converting PowerPoint presentations to Web-based HTML presentations. And as a sideline, it can even do simple text extraction and image exports if you set it up correctly!

"The most gratifying response, though, was the time I talked with Tom on the phone as he viewed one of our sample PPT2HTML conversions on my site. When he was done, he told me that this was the first time he'd ever been able to 'see' ... his word ... a presentation.

"I wrote PPTMerge for my wife, who teaches art and does awards presentations. I realized that with a little VBA (Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications), I could create certificates from a single slide with a list of names. I posted that as an add-in; somebody saw it and said, 'This is cool, but what we really need is to personalize our standard presentation for sales prospects.' So, I tweaked it a little so that it would spit out multiple presentations, one for each record in a database."

Editor's note: The two add-ins that Steve mentions, PPTMerge and PPT2HTML, are available from PPTools.

Best underused PowerPoint feature?   "My favorite feature is the goofiest thing, and it's been in there forever. You can take a text file from Microsoft Notepad and make it a presentation outline with the most basic formatting."

Favorite quote/motto?   "Success is preceded only by the courage to let go."

When not at a computer, most likely to be found where?   Cycling, enjoying the monthly Cincinnati Artwalk with artist and wife Helen Rindsberg, volunteering with the Sister Cities Association of Greater Cincinnati, or traveling in Japan. Steve and Helen have hosted Japanese exchange students from Gifu, Cincinnati's sister city in Japan, for 15 years.

Visit Steve's site

Most helpful Office Online topics:  

Add photos to a customized PowerPoint photo album

About setting up self-running PowerPoint presentations