The Library is quite the busy place this week—at least for me it is. This is Access residency week. For those of you who don’t know, Access is Covenant’s distance education program. During residency week, Access students come into town for a week of high intensity course work for which they’ve been preparing during the previous months. While they’re in town, it’s a good opportunity to give them an orientation to the services that the seminary offers to its students, including library privileges. Thus, being the librarian in charge of public services (reference, circulation, bibliographic instruction, database access, etc.) I had to give a presentation to the Access students at residency for the first time.
Now Per, my brilliant predecessor, having presented at this orientation numerous times in the past, left me the nice PowerPoint slideshow that he has refined over the years. Nevertheless, I felt it necessary to make a few changes—to personalize it to my style. The first order of business was to nix the animated screen shots and go to live demos. Second, I had to rearrange a few things to better fit my intended flow. Third, I needed a new design template, since the one Per had used screamed 1990′s (which is probably when he first made the presentation after all). None of the factory-installed design templates struck my fancy, so I ventured onto Microsoft Office Online where I found a nice design featuring a stack of books—rather appropriate for a library, I thought. With a new, more contemporary design template featuring subtler, more natural coloration and a photographic accent, my PowerPoint slideshow was ready to go—and just in nick of time too!
I was pleased with how well the presentation went. I had to go pretty quick, but I managed to cover all the basics and I also answered quite a few follow-up questions along the way. The next day I had the opportunity to have lunch with the Access students, and many of them expressed their appreciation for my presentation. I was glad for the positive feedback.
Back home, I decided that I liked the design template that I had found so much that I wanted it on my home computers. I launched PowerPoint, but found that Office Online wasn’t as nicely integrated on the Mac as I had remembered it being on Windows at work. First, I tried Mactopia, Microsoft’s Mac specific website, but I couldn’t turn up any templates that were not already installed on my computer. I then ventured over to the generic Office site (where every page informs you that you are using an unsupported browser unless you are using IE… grrrr). I tracked down the template and downloaded it. However, when I tried to open the compressed file, I found that it was a .cab file that Stuffit Expander couldn’t open despite the nice Stuffit-style icon that had been assigned to it.
Not to be deterred, I headed over to Mac OS X Hints, where I found just the hint I was looking for. Someone had written in some time ago about an open-source, command-line .cab utility (although no executable binary was available, and it had to be built from the source code). In addition, much to my delight, one of the comments on the hint was someone announcing that he was going to put together a package for Fink. I launched FinkCommander, found cabextract, and installed it. Sure enough, cabextract did the trick. It opened the .cab file and I had my template. I just had to give it a sensible name (and appropriate file type and creator codes for good measure), and I was ready to go. The only snag is that I haven’t been able to figure out how to get the template to show up in the formatting palette along with the default templates. Hmmm…
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