Introduction

DataPoint is our PowerPoint add-on to display real-time information on your slides. There are 4 different editions of DataPoint;

• Standard edition
• Enterprise edition
• Viewer edition
• Runtime edition

Definitions

First we need to clarify some words here, before we start explaining what each edition can do…

DataPoint presentation

A DataPoint presentation is a normal Microsoft PowerPoint with data connections. First of all, you set up data connections in your presentation. A data connections is a link to e.g. a Microsoft Excel file, a connection to a SQL server database, or an XML file on the internet. After that step, you link your text boxes, images, tables etc to those data connections in order to have real-time information on your slides.

Data Driven Slideshows

A data driven slideshow is a slideshow of a DataPoint presentation. When you start the slideshow, the dynamic information from the data connections, is read and updated on your slides. During the slideshow, the information is continuously checked for data changes. Whenever that information is changed in a database, the slideshow is updated accordingly so that it always shows the latest information.

Snapshot Presentations

You can create snapshot presentations out of DataPoint presentations. Open your DataPoint presentation and click the Snapshot button of the DataPoint menu. This action will create a completely new presentation, based on your DataPoint presentation, but with the latest information. Once that every slide is refreshed, the existing links to your data connections are broken and the connections are deleted from the snapshot presentation.

Furthermore for snapshot presentations, slides with data scrolling enabled, will result in a new slide per data record of that data scrolling connection. So that is ideal for generating product catalogues or project listings etc. Connect the first slide to the first record, imagine 180 products in your database, and as results, you end up with a snapshot presentation of 180 individual slides.

There are 2 types of snapshot presentations:

• global snapshot: this is the snapshot example of 180 slides in one PowerPoint file
• document snapshot: this special feature has the ability to generate 180 individual documents, as a result of the mail merge snapshot functionality. These documents can be in PowerPoint format, PDF document, images and even exported to video format.

Command Line Tool

A command line tool is a small program, without an user interface nor manual interactions with the user, that runs a series of commands. The DataPoint Generator, or the command line tool, can create snapshot presentations via a script or scheduled task on your computer. With such a tool like the command line tool, you can schedule to create daily snapshot presentations e.g. on a server, every morning at 06:00.

Now that we have explained all of this, we can now better explain where each edition stands for.

Standard edition

This first edition of DataPoint is the most basic edition, but you can do almost everything with it. Most people use this edition and is ideal to create data driven presentations.

With this edition, you can:

• Create DataPoint presentations
• Display data driven slideshows on a screen
• Create snapshot presentations; global snapshots only, or in other words, a snapshot in one file

If you will be the only one that is responsible to create and run dynamic presentations, use this edition! No doubt about that. You can use it to display real-time data on a screen, or to generate snapshot presentations whenever you need it.

When you need to display a live information as a data driven slideshow on another computer or display, then you need an additional license of DataPoint Standard edition. When your colleague wants to help you with data driven presentations, then you need a second license of the DataPoint Standard edition for his or her computer.

Enterprise edition

The second edition is the DataPoint Enterprise edition. A license costs more than a normal Standard edition, but you have some nice features on top, typically for larger environments.

• Same functionality as the DataPoint Standard edition
• DataPoint Generator; command line tool to generate snapshot presentations via scheduled tasks
• Create snapshot presentations: global and document snapshots
• Use data driven presentations with the free DataPoint Viewer

Most DataPoint Enterprise edition users, use this edition because of the reason that they can create data driven presentations with it, and that their colleagues or team members, can use the free DataPoint Viewer edition to see data driven presentations. Thus seeing the latest information in their presentations.

Viewer edition

A free edition of our DataPoint product. It can use data driven presentations that are created with the DataPoint Enterprise edition only. So you typically have one or two users in your company that are responsible to create the DataPoint presentations with the Enterprise edition. Next to those designers, you can have ten’s or hundred’s of users using the free DataPoint Viewer edition.

With the free Viewer edition, dynamic data in your presentation, will be refreshed when you open the presentation. If you would start a slideshow afterwards with this presentation, it will only display the initially updated information. It will not update during the slideshow. And you cannot edit or view the data connections of the data files, you can only use it.

The free Viewer functionality is intended only for statistical purposes or reporting in a company. You cannot use the edition to update data continuously on a monitor at your company. For that purpose, you need a Standard edition.

Actually you can put it this way. With the free Viewer edition, you generate a kind of global snapshot presentation when you open the presentation.

Runtime edition

The DataPoint Runtime edition can be installed together with an iPoint player license. With an iPoint player license, you are also allowed to install a DataPoint Runtime edition on the computer. So in case you want to use data driven slideshows on your iPoint players, then acquire a license of DataPoint Standard edition to design and set up your DataPoint presentation.

A Runtime edition does update the slideshow continuously and is more or less the same as the Standard edition, with a few exceptions:

• You cannot view or edit the data connections being used in the presentation
• You cannot link new PowerPoint shapes (text boxes, tables etc) to data connections, you can only use the presentation as it was set up.
• The Runtime edition will not display connectivity errors when for example a data connection is not reachable. You don’t want to see an error message popping up on your information screen. Problems and errors are communicated silently to the iPoint server and scheduler components.