Still update your digital signage by others? Now do it yourself!

As I’m running a grocery in Atlanta, I deployed a digital signage system last autumn to inspire people to make more purchasing decisions in-store. But the troubles come with after. I have to hire a freelance designer to update my promotion content periodically with some digital signage creation tools. That was really a waste I think and sometimes it could not be timely.

When I have PowerPoint 2007 installed in my computer this spring, I realized that it was time to pay off after investing large amounts of time and talents in creating presentations with PowerPoint for years. Actually I’m able to make most creations for digital signage with PowerPoint. And now with powerful PowerPoint 2007, quickly creating dynamic contents for digital signage is not privilege for professionals more.

Why I’m so confident to say so? Please have a look at what I have done to my digital signage through PowerPoint 2007.

- First of all, I’m telling you that it’s easier to adjust the slide size to fit my widescreen plasma in PowerPoint 2007 than in other versions. The feature is so helpful. Click “Design –> Page Setup”, there’re three on-screen show size of 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 to meet different needs of digital signage display.

- Then importing rich media that allure customers is essential for digital signage presentation. PowerPoint 2007 supports nearly all common multimedia files. Whether displaying background music from CD, commercial video clips or Flash animations for promotion etc. It’s a piece of cake here.

- As the most important part in digital signage presentation, text also can get better improved in PowerPoint 2007. Building glows, bevels, and reflections applied to any texts, and more dazzling WordArts styles help my presentations draw attentions from potential buyers. That’s wonderful.

- In addition to supporting most rich-media contents and enhancing text treatment, digital signage can be well decorated by SmartArt diagramming in PowerPoint 2007. But why should I want to use SmartArt when I can use just plain bulleted text? There are many advantages. The good point is, SmartArt lets me visually represent a variety of concepts and ideas that might not work too well with just text.

Finally, the compelling presentations in PowerPoint 2007 are well done. All I need to do is transfer them to my digital signage system. Unfortunately maybe not all digital signage applications support new PowerPoint 2007 files. So I advise converting these files to Flash movies.

Why Flash? Good question. Because Flash is extremely capable, and it presents information in a rich way. Converting to Flash files could be applicable solution to digital signage with PowerPoint 2007. As I know, not all conversion tools can genuinely supports new effects in PowerPoint 2007. I use Wondershare PPT2Flash to achieve. You can learn more about it at http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash-2007.html. As a few experts in that realm of digital signage said, in the future, Flash could take digital signage to a new level.

That’s all there is to it. I’m definitely not a fan of Microsoft Office, but admittedly, creating contents of digital signage with PowerPoint 2007 is a huge saving: reduce extra in creating, avoid collisions with time, and impress the shoppers to purchase more.