Mac Automation: automating Microsoft PowerPoint 2008

Setting up the workflow
First off you must create a new PowerPoint slide show. Create your slides as you normally would. When you get the Automator actions in place, you'll need to need to tweak the "Apply Animation to PowerPoint Slide Parts" action to your liking. You can choose which slide part to animate and the effect it will use.

Be sure to choose a Save as name in the "Convert PowerPoint Presentations to Movies" action. You can also change how your movie will play once it is done in the "Play Movies" action.

Running the workflow
To run the workflow, just open your PowerPoint slide show that you created earlier and click the run button in the top-right corner of Automator. The currently opened PowerPoint slide show will have the animation you specified applied to it and will then be converted to a QuickTime .mov file. After the video is converted, QuickTime will open and play the movie as you specified in the "Play Movies" action.



Saving the workflow
You can now save the Automator workflow to your liking.

Applications of this workflow
You can tweak this workflow and use your Mac as a kiosk-type display.

Remember, if you would like to know how to automate something in Mac OS X be sure to leave a comment.