This is the first in a recurring “Did You Know” series of mailing/blog posts that I’ll be sending out periodically as I discover common questions that Friends are asking, as well as common issues that y’all are facing.
Today’s Did You Know #1 relates to some odd behavior that has been reported with Projector’s in-app PowerPoint slideshow conversion when run on iOS/iPadOS 13.
Ever since the deprecation of the Planning Center Projector app (and the beginning of WorshipStorm Projector), the server-based PowerPoint slideshow conversion that Planning Center Services used to have has been unavailable. To compensate for the lack of that functionality, we added in-app PowerPoint conversion to Projector that is based on Apple’s QuickLook technology, which is essentially a ‘preview’ for PowerPoint slides that is built into the Apple operating systems. The in-app PowerPoint conversion is therefore a ‘best effort’ approach for Projector when presented with a PowerPoint (.ppt or .pptx) file, to attempt to convert it into slides.
Our approach has always been to make this convenience feature available in Projector, with the caveat that “all slides may not look correct” when using the in-app conversion. We’ve heard from a number of you that when they upgraded their device to iOS 13 / iPadOS 13, some of the PowerPoint slide decks either no longer converted properly, or started looking odd. This is not a big surprise, since the behavior of Apple’s QuickLook is something that we have no control over.
However, we have also had a very robust alternative to in-app PowerPoint conversion that guarantees “pixel-perfect” slide generation. I call this alternative “Export and ZIP”. Essentially, you choose the Export function in PowerPoint to convert the slide deck into individual image files, compress those files up into a single ZIP file, then upload the ZIP file to Planning Center Services instead of the PowerPoint file.
Please check out our Converting PowerPoint to ZIP online article for detailed instructions on how to do this!