#liveboard

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During the last few months, I have been fortunate enough to help my uncle, a small business owner, with some special projects such as building a company website, creating business cards, and recently, developing an “LCI LiveBoard.”

The LCI LiveBoard isn’t to be confused with LiveBoard: RealTime Whiteboard app, however, there are some similarities. The essence of the LCI LiveBoard is a presentation, projected on a screen or displayed on a monitor, that pulls live real-time data from various places, thus providing employees with valuable and necessary information throughout the day while they work. My uncle’s business, LCI, is a cabinetry company. However, I believe a real-time data liveboard like the one we created for his business would be beneficial to many organizations including schools. The LCI LiveBoard pulls real-time information from various documents stored on the company’s shared network L: Drive, as well as, different websites. What do I mean by real-time? When the documents or sites linked to the presentation are updated or changed, that new data or changes are instantly displayed on the liveboard presentation. Think of the possibilities for using this technology in a classroom setting, faculty setting, or school-wide setting.

For this post, I would like to walk through the steps we used to create the LCI LiveBoard.

The presentation software used for the LCI LiveBoard is Microsoft PowerPoint. I created a master slide which included the LCI logo. Information for the presentation needed to pull from Excel and the Internet.

To pull live information from a website, I found and downloaded the PowerPoint add-in LiveSlides found here. This add-in allows the user to embed any website into either PowerPoint or Keynote. According to the LiveSlides FAQ, the add-in “LiveSlides adds Chrome browser capabilities to PowerPoint, but removes the look and feel of a browser window.” The add-in is incredibly user-friendly and works with many sites. We used LiveSlides to embed a weather radar and a Google Calendar. Both of which will update in real-time.  

To pull live data from an Excel sheet, the cells that contained the needed data were selected and copied. These cells are then linked to a PowerPoint slide; this is done by doing a Special Paste, not Paste, but Special Paste. A command box will come up, select Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object and Paste link. By choosing the Paste link the PowerPoint slide “creates a shortcut to the source file so that changes to the source file will be reflected in your presentation,” (Microsoft 2016) thus, live data. Additionally, the Excel notebook from which the Excel sheet cells come from needs to belong to a shared notebook. For more information on this, click here.

Next, we needed the presentation to play, loop automatically, and update data each presentation cycle. Doing this task required installing an additional add-in and creating a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macro code, the programming language of Microsoft Office programs. To do this, first, make sure the Developer tab is displayed in the PowerPoint ribbon. For information on how to do this, click here.

To execute automatic macros at various events in the PowerPoint presentation, we downloaded the AutoEvents Add-in from OfficeTips, available here. Once enabling the add-in, you can set macro execution for several events.

To cause the linked Excel data to update when the PowerPoint presentation loops, we needed to create a VBA macro code. After some research, we discovered the following code that worked:

Sub UpdateLink ()

ActivePresentation.UpdateLinks

End Sub

Sub OnSlideShowPageChange (ByVal SSW As SlideShowWindow)

‘

‘ AUTO UPDATE OF OLE LINKS MARCO

‘

   If SSW.View.CurrentShowPositions = 6 Then

       ActivePresentation.UpdateLinks

   End If

End Sub (Stackoverflow 2012)

MadeWithCode.com

Thanks to Stack Overflow Community for this code, the reference for where we found this code is available here. In the line of code reading If SSW.View.CurrentShowPositions = 6 Then the number 6 was the number of slides we wanted the links to be updated after. Therefore, this number would be different depending on the number of slides in a presentation.

Finally, we downloaded ShowPoint, available here. ShowPoint will automatically start a presentation on a computer monitor or tv screen. Additionally, when starting ShowPoint, it will automatically look for updates from the source file presentation, again, allowing real-time live data display.

We plan on experimenting more with the LCI LiveBoard; I feel as though the possibilities are endless and I am excited to see how the same concept can be used in the education setting.

Yours Truly, LeNae

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Image credits IvoryMix and Graphic created on Canva

References

LiveSlides. 2016. “FAQ”. Accessed September 29, 2016. https://www.liveslides.com/faq.

Microsoft. 2016. “Paste Special.” Accessed September 29, 2016. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Paste-Special-e03db6c7-8295-4529-957d-16ac8a778719.

Stack Overflow Community. 2012. “Linked Excel Object in Powerpoint wont update when showing in slideshow.” Accessed September 29, 2016. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11662108/linked-excel-object-in-powerpoint-wont-update-when-showing-in-slideshow.