Wimpy Point: The Manual
WimpyPoint is a replacement for desktop bloatware such
as Microsoft
PowerPoint. You can build a slide presentation in
WimpyPoint from any Web browser anywhere in the world.
WimpyPoint will hold onto your presentation in a
professional maintained and backed up relational database management
system (Oracle 8). You can forget your laptop. You can drop your
laptop. You will still be able to give your presentation anywhere in
the world that you can find a Web browser.
More interestingly, WimpyPoint lets you work with
colleagues. From your desk at MIT, you can authorize a friend at
Stanford to edit your presentation, the two of you can work together
until you're satisfied, and then you can both go into a conference
room at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and give your talk from our
server. For more information on setting up access you can go here
(Naturally this assumes that our machine is up and running and the
various Internet backbones are operating properly. We strive for
maximum reliability but nobody can achieve 100% uptime for any
Internet service. If your career absolutely positively depends on a
presentation, we recommend using the Print button on your Web browser
to make a hardcopy of your slides.
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Some Basic WimpyPoint Concepts
We don't want to let people edit other people's presentations willy-nilly
(lest you walk into an important meeting only to find your work replaced by a
dirty picture),
but we certainly want to let users work with other collaboratively (that's the
whole point, right?). WimpyPoint allows authors to specify exactly who is
allowed to view and work on their presentations (for more info,
check out the help screens later once you've started working on your own
presentation). The details for setting up collaboration are in the Access controls section.
Black on white with red/blue/purple links and a 12-point serif font looks OK, but
it gets boring after a while (and may not suit some people's needs). For
this reason, we let you select styles to use when viewing presentations.
(You can change the style used to view a presentation by clicking the
Change Style link in the lower-right corner on a presentation's
table of contents.)
Styles can change pages' background and color scheme, and even more if
you know how to write CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
code.
For more details on creating your own styles, you should see the style editing section
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From the main screen, WimpyPoint's index page, you
can locate a presentation to view or edit. There
may be quite a few presentations already in WimpyPoint.
You probably don't want to see a list of all of them -
the sliders at the top of the
screen let you select
- whether you want to see presentations created in the past week,
two weeks, or month, or all presentations since the beginning of time
(i.e., early 1998).
- whether you want to see only your own presentations (presentations which you have created
or are collaborating on), or presentations created by anyone at all. This slider only
shows up if have an account on the community system you are using and are logged in.
To show a presentation, click its title. To edit a presentation (assuming
that you created it or are a collaborator), click the edit link
next to its listing.
You can follow the links under Options to
- create a new presentation (available only if you're logged in),
- list WimpyPoint users, so that you can see a list of all presentations
created by a particular person,
- search for a string or concept in an existing presentation, or
- view/create/edit styles which can be used to
prettify presentations.
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From the main page in WimpyPoint, you can create your own presentation. To do this, follow the link for creating a new presentation, and follow the instructions which appear above each of the entry boxes. Once you choose to save the presentation, you will then go on to either creating a new style for the presentation, or directly on to creating slide
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The "Create a Slide" page is used both to create and edit slides. If a slide is being edited, the information from your slides will be filled into the various fields on this page. If you are creating a new slide, all of the fields will be blank.
There are four main portions of a Wimpy Point slide:
- Slide Title
This appears in large letters at the top of the slide.
- Preamble
This will appear as block of text under your title, and above any bulleted list which you have created. The creation of a preamble is optional is optional.
- Bullet Items
A bulleted list will be created in the middle of the slide, based on the list created here. If there are not enough lines to finish your list, you will have the opportunity to create more lines once the slide has been saved. The arrows next to each of the lines allows you to swap that line with the one that the arrow is pointing at.
- Postamble
This will appear as a block of text at the bottom of your page, and right under your bulleted list. Like the preamble, it is optional.
If you would like to add an image or other file, you should follow the Upload Attachment link. Otherwise, follow the Save Slide link to either save the changes made to your slide, or to add the new slide to your presentation.
If the you choose to add an attachment from the create slide page, you will end up on the slide attachment page. This page allows you to attach images to a slide in your presentation,
or upload a file (an "attachment") to be linked from the slide.
The top of the box displays a list of all images and attachments
(if any) currently associated with the slide, along with their
respective sizes and an indication of where they are displayed (these
options correspond to the options in the bottom half of the box).
To add an image or attachment, click the Browse... button
and select the file containing the image or attachment. Choose how you
want the file displayed (if it's not an image, you'll want to select
Display a link the viewer can use to download the file),
and click Add the Attachment. Once you do this, you can click
Preview the Slide to see how the slide will look.
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On the style editing page, Colors are specified using the usual red/green/blue scheme (familiar
to anyone who's used Photoshop or written HTML code). Each component
is a number from 0 to 255; the first component is red, the second is green, and the third is blue.
If you prefer, you can just select a color from the pull-down menu which is
close to the one that you envision, and then try mucking around with the
resultant numbers.
You can select any of the images you've uploaded to use as the
background for your slides.
For Advanced Users
If you know CSS (Cascading Style Sheets),
you can key in (or cut and paste) some CSS code to be linked to your slides. (The
colors and background image supplied on the top half of this page are incorporated
only as attributes to the <BODY> tag, so any CSS settings you provide will
override them for CSS-aware browsers.)
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From a presentation's main page, you can follow a link to choose who has different levels of access to apresentation.
From the access control page, users can be granted one of three levels of access to a presentation:
- View-only - these users can view the presentation but
can't make changes to it. If the presentation is public, all users
can automatically view the presentaiton.
- Collaborator - these users can view and make changes
to the presentation (e.g., edit and delete slides, change the
presentation's title, etc.). They can't delete the presentation or
freeze the slide set, however.
- Owner - these users can do whatever they want to the presentation
(view or make changes to it, delete the entire presentation, freeze
the slide set, etc.). Owners can also give other users permission
to view the presentation, or to make other users collaborators or owners.
This page also allows you to grant users permission to view, collaborate on,
or own the presentation. It displays a box for each of these privileges
(omitting the view-only box if the presentation is public).
To invite a person to view, collaborate on, or own the presentation,
click the Add One button in one of the boxes. (Note that you
can even add a person who hasn't registered with this community system.)
You'll have the option to send the person whom you invite an E-mail
containing a link which he or she can use to go directly to the
presentation.
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Freezing
From the main page for a presentation, you can choose to "freeze a set of slides". Wimpy point allows you to have as many versions of a set of slides as you desire. Every time you "freeze" a presentation, you create a version of that presentation, and all of the slides with it, which can be "restored" at any point in time in the future. This can be used to keep a polished, presentation-ready version of a slide-show, while editing another version. It also works well for having a copy of the slide show which was used for a particular presentation, making it possible to look back and see what versions of the presentation might have been more or less successful. On the actual freeze page, you can enter a line of text to help you remember what the saved version of the presentation is. Pressing the Freeze Presentation button will allow you to return to the main page for the presentation.
Restoring a "frozen" version
Once a presentation has been frozen, a new section will appear on the main page for the presentation, allowing frozen versions of the given presentation to be viewed, viewed with any comments which have been added to the verstion, or to even replace the current version with one of the frozen versions. In any of the three cases, a version must be first be selected by using the presentation's "previous versions" drop-down menu. The version can then be viewed by pressing either of the view buttons; in this case, nothing will happen to the current version. It can also be restored by pushing the "restore previous version" button underneath the drop-down. If this is the case, you will be brought to a screen to confirm your choice. Warning if you restore a frozen version, without freezing your current version, your work may be lost forever. Once you have done this, the restored version of your presentation will take the place of whatever version was current at the time.
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Adam Pennington
Last modified: Tue May 30 23:18:56 EDT 2000