Docia started out by showing us a finished product she put together using Presentations 10, made by Corel. It was a slide show of the life of her daughter, Kitty, beautifully put to music and set to automatically advance the slides throughout the presentation. It had been saved as an EXE program using Corel's Show On the Go. This way, the presentation can be sent to someone that doesn't have the software on their PC.

Next, Docia showed us a cute little program called PhotoJam, by Shockwave.com. This program will take all the photos from a folder on your hard drive, and put together a slide show for you automatically. You get to pick the background music, and a style for the slide transitions. It's so easy to put together a presentation, you can do it in just a minute. The strength of this package is in its styles. Docia showed us a few of them, such as 80's Video, Old Film, and Story Book. The program can be downloaded for free, but the demo won't let you save the presentations. For a mere $29, you can register the program, which allows you to save your presentations so that you can send them to others to enjoy.

Next, Docia showed us a program called Ulead Photo Explorer, made by Ulead Systems. She handed out free copies of version 6 on CD-ROMs to those that wanted them. She will bring more copies to the next meeting. She demonstrated version 7 to us, and it is a slick program for editing your photos, then putting them together to make professional looking presentations. The advantage of this program over the PhotoJam, is that you can select more than one song for the background music, and you can manually override the pace at which the slide show plays back. You can also vary the slide transitions, so that you aren't using the same one over and over. Photo Explorer costs only $25, and is well worth it.

Finally, Docia pointed out that the music you choose for the background in your slide shows is one of the most important factors in making a really great presentation. She prefers to use MP3 files, since they are much smaller than WAV files, and sound better than MIDI files. She usually downloads her MP3 files from LimeWire, then manages them using MusicMatch.

At the March meeting, we will feature "Fun with Music" by demonstrating lots of fun programs to create and play music on your PC. Come join the fun at the Harmon Foundation, 2901 S. Harvard, on the third Tuesday of each month at 7:00 PM.

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