Powerpoint Twitter Magic – now you can tweet from PowerPoint

In my post 10 tools for presenting with Twitter, I lamented that there was no easy-to-use way of posting tweets from within PowerPoint. Timo Elliott of SAPWeb2.0 has now created an add-in for PowerPoint 2004 and 2007 which does just that. It’s called AutoTweet.

Thank you Timo – you’re a star!

Go to Timo’s PowerPoint Twitter page to download the add-in. Open PowerPoint, and click on the Add-in ribbon. Then click on Autotweet – highlighted in this screenshot:

You’ll get this Dialog box:

Then type your tweet into the Notes pane of your PowerPoint slide. Type [twitter] before your tweet and [/twitter] after your tweet. Then when you click onto that slide, that tweet will get posted to Twitter.

This new tool is in alpha mode – meaning it’s not yet been thoroughly tested (Timo is looking for testers). In my first test it worked beautifully.

What about Keynote users?

You’ve already got an add-in. It’s called Keynote Tweet and works in much the same way.

Why would you want to do this?

There’s lots of tweeting going on at conferences. But often the presenter is the only one not taking part. This way you can be present in the backchannel of your presentation. And you can make it easy for your audience to retweet the main points of your presentation (make sure your tweet is easily retweetable by allowing space for “RT @yourusername” within the 140 characters).

One warning – create two versions of your PowerPoint show – one with the tweets and one without so that you can practice with your slides without sending multiple tweets several times over.

Tagged as: PowerPoint Twitter