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Name Display Software Solution
I am planning equipment for a conference event in the next few months but need a piece of software which will allow me to search for a name/title in a list as the person is called to stage and then go live with the relevant name/title onscreen in a PIP when they speak at the lectern.
Obviously the reason for having the names all preloaded in and a search function is to eliminate typing errors (especially when typing at speed based on the announcement).
I am likely to get the name/title data in an excel spreadsheet prior to the event of all the delegates that are there and could speak.
I just wondered if there was anything out there already that I could use or buy instead of struggling to create some kind of custom software tool?
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4 Replies
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You can keep this simple and use PowerPoint, plus a tool like PPTools PPT Merge to get the data in from your spreadsheet.
If that’s too simple, can you describe your other requirements?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Thanks Walter for your suggestion.
Essentially there are several hundred people from different companies and during the conference, any of them could be called up to stage to contribute. Basically I need to get their name and title into the PIP on screen in the shortest time possible until the finish and the next one comes up.
I envisaged some kind of software where you preload the names in or retrieve from a database then whilst live, you search for the name, double click it and it would send it to the extended/secondary monitor (which would be the main output to the screens). Naturally this is how I could imagine it might work, but there could well be completely different methods out there.
For smaller conferences we have done it in PowerPoint and given each name a slide then had a list of names and their corresponding slide number, however this was with up to 70 odd names as opposed to several hundred (searching a list for a corresponding number out of several hundred i would imagine would be slower than typing the name itself?).
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How about a hybrid approach? Create your PowerPoint based names using whatever merger method works best for you. But then have your operator have a separate computer with some sort of database that they can quickly search by name, which spits out the corresponding number that they can quickly punch in and take on the PPT computer. With the right setup and a tad bit of practice, I think a good operator could make this workflow move pretty darn fast.
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Thanks, Matt, that could work and worth thinking about.
I’ve not done any merging with PowerPoint before but does it work in such a way that I can format a ‘name template’, then merge the Excel doc and PPT just generals X amount of slides to fit with the template (presumably so long as the Excel doc column headings match however the text boxes are ‘mapped’ in PPT)?
(I’m not really asking for step by step on this as I appreciate that it would be going off topic but just wondered if that is a possible workflow or if its not as clever as that?)
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