Practicing for the big talk

I am putting the final touches on my presentation for the eTech Ohio 2008 conference.  I have more than 300 hundred slides and only 45 minutes to present.  Timing is critical.  To get ready I have been practicing using my iPod Touch.

PowerPoint has a “Save As” option that permits slides to be saved as JPG files.  Each slide is saved as a separate file called SLIDE#.JPG where # is the slide number.  I imported the pictures into my iPod Touch.  Using the normal scrolling action, I can go through the slides on the iPod any time I have a few spare minutes.

I did have one little hiccup in the process.  SLIDE1.JPG was followed by SLIDE10.JPG which was followed by SLIDE100.JPG.  I solved the problem using my favorite renaming tool – Flexible Renamer.  I told it to add “00″ to the first ten slides making SLIDE1.JPG into SLIDE001.JPG, etc.  After that I added one zero to slides 10 through 99.  All the file names after 99 were OK as they were.  Renaming this way took a few seconds and arranged all the slides in the proper order on my iPod Touch.