ROSEMARY MACMULLEN: Left powerless with Power Point (From Hampshire Chronicle)

ROSEMARY MACMULLEN: Left powerless with Power Point

3:38pm Thursday 10th May 2007 in News

"WE'D like you to give a talk," she said.

"What on?", I replied warily. "Anything you like," she said.

"We read your Chronicle column and saw you on Countdown."

I decided to do a hop, skip and jump through my intermittent appearances on stage, radio and TV, punctuated with a few of my poems.

Everyone expects slides, I knew that, so I spent the afternoon digging out my old books of photos and press cuttings.

Then I hit a snag. My scanner refused to do anything other than turn my black and white pictures into negatives!

After six attempts I clicked on colour' and it seemed to work. Time passed! Fuelled by tea and toast, I saved a couple of dozen and retired at midnight.

Day Two: Fishing out my Photo Express software I was soon framing, captioning and colouring my photos.

Downloading them onto disc proved a bit tricky, and I wasted several discs but I was relatively confident when trotting along to try out the church equipment.

Then Adviser One stepped in. "You need Power Point," he said.

"It will give you more control." What he sent to my computer would not open. I rang Adviser Two. "Never mind," he soothed. "I'll give you a tutorial on mine."

Suddenly I was in Disneyland. Animations, coloured backgrounds, fade-ins, fade-outs, screen dissolves.

I came home inspired. Time passed! Fuelled by tea and toast I mentally re-planned my presentation and retired at midnight.

Day Three: I cycled off to fetch the software and installed it. I spent the afternoon letting my creative juices flow and performing Power Point wonders.

Then I hit another snag. For some reason I couldn't download the slide programme onto my discs. I e-mailed Advisers Three and Four in panic.

Adviser Three replied with detailed instructions.

Adviser Four replied with different detailed instructions, but stopped me biting my nails with the reassuring words: "There is a solution."

Time passed! Fuelled by tea and toast I followed their words of wisdom. (At least the ones I could make some sense of!) Finally I managed to download and retired at midnight.

Day Four: Adviser Five tried out my slide show on his laptop and was very encouraging. I rang the first organiser who had asked me to talk. "Have you got a screen and projector and possibly a laptop?" There was a slight pause.

"Oh no, nothing like that," she said. "We just want you to talk!"

Time passed! Fuelled by tea and toast I made up a scrapbook to show and selected which of my many poems to use as back up to my anecdotes.

Finally I put it all together and retired at midnight.