How to Save Money on Technology Purchases

At this time of a year when the summer season is going to end and a new school semester is coming, the technology buying is becoming quite popular. The back to school purchases are especially high for those students heading to high school or college, mainly on such technology products like computers, tablets, Smartphone and software. We have used PowerPoint since we first start to use computer, so we know how important these technology weighs in school today. However, it is also very important to save money when purchase these tech essentials. Before you make your purchase decision, these 5 money-saving tips may help you a lot:

1. Try all means to find discounts on your desired product.

Most of the retailers will hold promotions in the back to school season. You may find the information on their websites or their page on Facebook and Twitter. Some of them may send out coupon codes to offer a certain discount. Remember to type that code when purchase online. Besides, reading online reviews of the products in publications like PC Magazine is good idea to follow up the latest tech information.

2. Consider software as a service option.

When purchasing software, you should consider it as a service option instead of a product. Usually software comes with free upgrade services, some of them have a deadline and some of them can be upgraded lifelong. So remember to read their service policy clearly.

3. Check out Open Source software.

Take open source software into consideration too. For example, instead of the widely use Microsoft Office, you can also use open source Open Office or Libre Office to make PowerPoint presentations. They offer much of the functionality of Microsoft Office, but they are totally free!

4. Forget extended warranties.

For most of the tech products, the manufacturers offer up to 3 years of warranties on the quality. You don’t need to pay more for the extended warranty. For these products like PC, Smartphones and tablets, usually they have a very long life cycle. As long as you choose a famous reliable brand, you may worry about it may run out of date too soon for the rapid development of technologies instead of the quality problems.

5. Always trust in yourself.

As the technology develops, for a single product you may see lots of models. Because of the information gap between the sellers and customers, you may not get the best product for the right price. It’s best if you can take some time to get to know the knowledge about the tech products. Or you should ask a reliable friend for consultation.

Convert PPT to Video for Viewing on iPod Touch 4

The days when we carry a walkman or MP3 player for listening to music or watching movies have gone. Instead most of us now turn to iPod Touch 4 for music, movies, games and web browsing. To make it simple, an iPod Touch 4 is the reduced version of iPhone 4 with almost all the features and functions except for phone calling.

The iPod Touch 4 can also serve as a powerful learning gadget for viewing PowerPoint presentations. However, just like other Smartphones and tablets, no matter from Apple or Android, the iPod Touch 4 don’t have a PowerPoint software that will enable you to open and view PowerPoint. Still we have two methods to view PowerPoint presentations on iPod Touch 4.

Method 1: Export PowerPoint as images.

Images files are originally supported by iPod Touch 4 and we could save PowerPoint as images (just click “Save As” in PowerPoint and choose image as output format) and put all the images into a new folder in correct order, then use iTunes to sync the new folder so that we can display PowerPoint on iPod Touch 4. This will work but all the original PowerPoint animations, transitions, music and video clips will be lost.

Method 2: Save PowerPoint as iPod Touch 4 video.

Because viewing PowerPoint on iPod Touch 4 as images seems a dull thing, we can further make the images as a video using Windows Movie Maker. Import the images into WMM and then we can add transitions, music to make it looks better.

Actually we don’t need to take so much time to save PowerPoint as video, why not use Moyea PPT to Video Converter to convert PowerPoint presentations to video format such as MP4 directly. The best of this tool is that the exported video will keep all the charming animations, transitions, music and video clips retained.

Step 1: Import PowerPoint files to this PPT to iPod Touch 4 converter.

We can add PowerPoint files in different formats like PPT, PPTX, POT, POTX, POTM, PPS, PPSX for converting to more than 130 video formats such as MP4, AVI, WMV, FLV, 3GP, RMVB, , MOV, MKV, etc.

Step 2: Choose an output video format for iPod Touch 4.

Click “Settings” to choose a video format for the exported iPod Touch 4 video (let’s take MP4 as example). We can also adjust the video parameters like video codec, bit rate, video size and frame rate, etc for better video quality.

Step 3: Convert.

After the above settings, we can click “Start” button to convert PowerPoint to iPod Touch 4 video now and then you can import the video to iPod Touch 4 or sync with iTunes.

How to Set Widescreen in PowerPoint 2007

Widescreen has become the most popular standards for the display. Since about 5 years ago, widescreen has been used in the computer. It is said that widescreen will save much space and take full use of the space on the screen.

Previously the screen is 4:3 but the movies is always at 16:9, so when we watch a movie on 4:3 computer, there will be black space above and below the pictures. While the 16:9 widescreen can take up all the display room.

However, most of the softwares are designed for 4:3 screen. While some of them added support for 16:9 screen but the default is still 4:3, like Microsoft PowerPoint. So here we would like to tell how to set widescreen in PowerPoint 2007.

First, click on the “Design” tab on the ribbon and choose “Page Setup”.

In the pop up dialog box “Page Setup”, you will find many sizes for slides. There are two kinds of widescreen size ratios in PowerPoint 2007 – 16:9 and 16:10. The 16:9 is the most widely used widescreen size ratio. So here we choose 16:9.

We could also customize the size ration by fill in the specifications we need. For example we can fill Width as 10 inches and Height as 5.63 inches to set a 16:9 widescreen.

Next click “OK” and you will see your PowerPoint slides in widescreen mode like this:

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