I suppose you think this is really fun, sitting there wondering what I'm going to say next.  Here's a clue: After 140 postings, I have no idea.

But here's a story that just cracks me up.  

Another thing that happened to me in Grade 2 was that I got a bad Report Card.  We all remember how scary bad report cards could be.  Under 'Needing Correction' it said "talks to her neighbors".  There were 30 other people in the room and the teacher was boring me to tears, what else was I supposed to do?  I went home trembling in my shoes.  God forbid we should raise children who grow up talking to their neighbors.  No wonder so many of us ended up in therapy.  Obviously, they didn't see Facebook, Digo and Twitter coming.

So, in keeping with the Grade 2 theme I thought I'd start a new feature called What I Learned (about computers) This Week.

The main thing that's occurred to me over the past week is that my computer is mostly used for shuffling information from one place to another.  It's a recurring realization that only varies in intensity.  The information just keeps coming and then I have to put it somewhere.  Maybe only because it's Spring and the lilacs are budding it seems like a really odd thing to be doing 8, 10, 12 hours a day.  When communication was mostly verbal, it was in one ear and out the other.  Much simpler.

Back in the days before I started telling people to STOP or I was going to block their addresses, I got the daily funnies from people who don't use their computers for anything other than email, and they have no concept there's anything else going on out here.  Some of them have comedic value -


- but most of them don't (what's stupid about women alternating daily with what's stupid about men) and it's just irritating. 

So, most of them went to the trash, but then some other people started in with the PowerPoint slideshows.   

I'm a sucker for photographs and it's beyond me to throw any away, so I started tucking the slideshows away in a folder somewhere.  As ever, I'm still drilling through my hard-drive determined to skinny down to the essentials.  I hadn't seen the slideshows in years and if it wasn't for cleaning up I never would have come across them again.  But now that I have I've decided I may find a use for the pictures someday.

So, for anyone who wants to know how to extract pictures from PowerPoint slideshows here's how:

Put the slideshow on Play and then hit your Print Screen button on each picture as it goes by.  This will take each picture, one at a time, to somewhere.  On my computer it goes to FastStone Screen Capture by default.  If you don't have a screenshot program it will just go to the clipboard and then you'll have to paste it into a graphics program.  Then you save the picture and repeat.  

As you can imagine, that's a long and tedious process.  If you're only after a few pictures it'll do.  If you want lots of pictures and you have PowerPoint on your computer there may be simple way to do it there, since .pps is a native format.  Otherwise, open the slideshow in OpenOffice Impress and export it as html.  It will break it all up into a bunch of files and the individual pictures.

Export is not the same as Save As.

Just ignore all that and click Create.

If you don't want a whole desktop installation of OpenOffice, you can get it as part of the standard PortableApps Suite.