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How to Download your Google Slides Presentation as a Video File

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With Microsoft Powerpoint, you can easily convert your presentation decks into high-resolution video files for uploading to YouTube and other video sites. The exported video files can also include all the voice narrations and background audio that you may have included in the presentation.

Google Slides doesn’t offer an option to save presentations as videos but there’s a new add-on in town – Creator Studio – that brings new export capabilities to your Google Slides. With Creator Studio, you’ll be able to save your decks as animated GIFs, image sequences and HD video (with audio).

Watch the video tutorial for a quick introduction.

To get started, go to creatorstudio.dev and install the Google Slides add-on. It requests certain permissions as it has to read the presentation images for converting them into movies. It also requires access to creating files in your Google Drive since the exported files are automatically uploaded to your Google Drive.

Once the add-on is installed, open any deck inside Google Slides that has at least 2 or more slides. Go to the add-ons menu, choose Creator Studio and it will open up a sidebar.

Specify the width of the output file in pixels. Creator Studio will auto-calculate the height to maintain the original aspect ratio of the presentation. Next, specify the time interval (in seconds) and this is the duration for which each slide would be visible in the video before advancing to the next slide.

google-slides-video-convert.png

Finally, you have a variety of export options to choose from that are not available natively inside Google Slides.

GIF Image

An infinite looping animated GIF image is created that is perfect for sharing inside email messages and blog posts. You can even make stop motion animations by keeping the time interval very low (say 0.2 seconds).

Image Sequence

Creator Studio will capture screenshots of each slide in your presentation and save it as a numbered PNG file in your Google Drive folder. Internally, it uses the Google Slides API to generate these thumbnail images.

MP4 Video

Like the GIF image, Creator Studio will produce an MP4 video file from your deck and you can also vary the time interval between slides.

Video with Audio 

You can upload any audio file in MP3 or WAV format and it will play alongside the presentation. You can upload background music or even voice narration that will play in the background while the video is playing.

google-drive-slides.png

Install Creator Studio

The post How to Download your Google Slides Presentation as a Video File appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

Miyubi: Oculus’ Feature-Length VR Experience

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Right. This is it. The world’s first feature length VR film for Oculus. Picture this. You’re in the 80s and you’re a robot. Yes. A Robot called “Miyubi”. The immersive VR film puts you as the lead, a robot who is now loved by a very typical American family after “dad” gets back from Japan. […]

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‘Overhead’: Why marketing is still seen as a cost-center

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Despite chief marketing officers making the case for how important marketing is to an overall business, marketing’s reputation as a “cost center,” versus one that actually drives profits, is hard to shake off.

Earlier this week, in what may be the latest sign that CEOs and CFOs still don’t understand the value of marketing, Uber cut 400 employees from its 1,200 person marketing department. The cuts follow a reorganization of the marketing department and the departure of CMO Rebecca Messina, whose tenure was less than a year. Even within a Silicon Valley darling, marketing departments face the same challenges: a revolving door in leadership (CMO tenure is reportedly down to just 43 months), tighter budgets, fewer resources, more accountability for how dollars spent perform and expanding responsibilities.

Reducing marketing overhead became the standard approach for troubled brands following the 2008 recession. Procter & Gamble, Unilever and General Mills, among others, cut their marketing spend, slashed their agency rosters and gave procurement departments much more power putting cost above all else. That approach hasn’t always proved successful — look at what cost-cutting has done to Sears or Kraft-Heinz — but it hasn’t dissuaded the C-Suite from slicing and dicing marketing.

At the same time, the scope of what marketing entails has grown to include much more than traditional commercial work but overall consumer experience of the brand as well as brand purpose. That has led major brands to rethink the CMO role, with some evolving it to a chief growth officer and others scrapping it altogether in favor of multiple vp roles. Whatever may be the case, marketing leads have worked to tie the growth and health of a brand, as well as its digital transformation, to marketing in part to shift the perception of marketing as a cost to one of value. 

“Most companies think that they are a product or service company with a marketing department – without really recognizing that they are a marketing company that happens to have a product or service,” wrote Dave Latcha, CEO and Founder of Latcha+Associates, in an email. “A great brand focuses on being relevant in peoples’ lives, proving value and providing a service or product that supports that. Two-thirds of that statement is marketing related.” 

Understanding the value of marketing
“Generally speaking, marketing equals overhead,” wrote Andy Nathan, founder and CEO Fortnight Collective. “Marketing is seen as an expense, and that’s why it’s the first to go.”

Part of the problem, according to We Are Rosie founder Stephanie Nadi Olson, is that generally marketers aren’t given a seat on the board of directors where many decisions about what stays and what goes when companies are in trouble are made. “It makes it really easy when someone is literally not in the room for their division or their area of responsibility to be disproportionately impacted by a big layoff,” said Olson. “Without representation at the board level, it hinders everyone’s understanding of the value of marketing.”

“There’s a lot of questions about what good marketing is at the board level,” said Andrew Essex, CEO and co-founder of Plan A and former Droga5 CEO. “That’s really regrettable and often short-term thinking. It’s always been hard to quantify, and despite all this innovation in technology, it’s still fairly hard to quantify. Boards historically undervalue the power of brand.” 

In those board rooms and throughout troubled companies, marketing departments have trouble attributing their work and showing how it impacts a company’s bottom line. 

“In this day and age of obsession over quarterly results, marketing often becomes the easiest target for change,” wrote Erik Herskind, CEO, Dallas-based creative collective GoDo Discovery Co., in an email. “While marketing has made tremendous strides to demonstrate measurable value to a company, there remains the belief that companies can turn marketing on and off when faced with financial challenges.” 

That doesn’t mean every marketing job is on the chopping block. Marketing analysts, ABM specialists, content writers and strategists who can show the connection between their work and incremental profit for the company are generally safer than others, per 3Q Digital CEO David Rodnitzky. “Other marketers — typically in areas like branding, PR, and marketing communications — are cost centers because their work has a directional, but not direct impact on profit,” wrote Rodnitzky in an email. “In no way does this diminish the value of these marketers, but when companies need to cut cost, cost-center marketers are the first to go.”

Rethinking the size of a marketing team
Still, even if marketers are able to prove the value of marketing to the C-Suite, analysts believe brands will have a hard time keeping a big team in-house. Some jobs, especially those charged with handling menial tasks that have lots of repetition, like data aggregation, will see those jobs handled by AI or bots as advancements in technology will allow brands to cut those roles, said Essex.

“In a world where agility is king, it’s hard to get an army of 1,200 people to be agile,” said Allen Adamson, brand consultant and co-founder of Metaforce. “Size and effectiveness have rarely gone hand-in-hand. Just because you’ve got a big marketing department, that doesn’t mean your marketing is good.”

Christian Barnard, CCO of Austin-based innovation agency T3, believes over the next six to nine months as CFOs worry about an impending recession, major marketers will continue to re-calibrate their marketing teams. “[Uber and McDonald’s], those are some of the several announcements like them that we’ll see in the next six to nine months as organizations prepare for what may be an economic downturn and get more lean on the marketing side,” said Barnard. “They will also using that as a time to recalibrate marketing capabilities to be much more [focused on the] user-experience, technology-centric and data-centric to get much more out of their spend.”

“A lot of companies are struggling with how to organize and how to determine the right internal marketing structure to drive growth in a market that’s incredibly hard to navigate,” said Adamson. “The old days of Don Draper sitting down and saying, ‘Here’s our commercial’ are gone.”

The post ‘Overhead’: Why marketing is still seen as a cost-center appeared first on Digiday.

How to Track your Study Time with Google Forms and Sheets

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In most organizations, employees are required to fill timesheets every week so the company can track the amount of time that people have spent working on various projects and tasks.

My kids are in middle/high school and I’ve been looking for a timesheet-style solution that would help me understand their studying patterns and learn how much time they spend on various subjects.

There are quite a few apps available for time tracking but I was looking for something simple and Google Forms fit the bill perfectly. The multiple-choice grid question is handy for quickly marking the time that they have spent on various subjects. I also added a Linear scale question for them to self-evaluate their daily screen time on a relative scale.

Here’s how the final study log form looks like:

Student Study Logs

The Email Form Notifications add-on is enabled for this Google Form so parents get an instant email when the boys submit the study log form. The email contains all the form answers in a neatly formatted table. An instant push notification is sent on the mobile phone as well with IFTTT.

Google Forms write all the form responses in a Google Spreadsheet and that makes it even easier to analyze the study pattern visually. You can use one of the available charts or hit the “Explore” button in Google Sheets and ask questions in natural English about the answers stored in your spreadsheet.

For instance, you can say “Sum of Subjects [Physics] by Name last week” and it will instantly tell you the amount of time that each kid has spent on that subject last week. Or say “What percentage of Subjects [Physics] is not empty where name is Aryaman” to know the percentage of days when he touched a particular subject.

Google Sheets Charts

And because Google Forms work just fine on mobile devices, students can quickly fill the time log anywhere as long as they know the form’s URL.

The post How to Track your Study Time with Google Forms and Sheets appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

Dog days of summer are here, but these air conditioner deals can cool you off

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We’re well into summer, but the hottest month — August — is yet to come. If you’re moving into a new place, need to replace an old AC unit that’s running a bit ragged, or just want something more powerful than your current air conditioner, then now is the time to grab a new portable or window-based AC before those dog days of summer really hit.

Below, we’ve picked out a handful of air conditioner deals available on both portable and window-mounted units from Walmart and Amazon right now. These include a few traditional models as well as a Wi-Fi-connected air conditioner for the modern smart home, and are available in a variety of different BTU outputs to help you find the right amount of cooling power for your pad:

air conditioner deals

LG is known mostly for its Android smartphones and 4K TVs, but his tech company also churns out some of the best air conditioners — both portable and window-mounted — on the market. This standing unit offers the convenience of both portability and remote control, letting you set the fan speed, timer, or sleep mode right from the comfort of your chair.

Walmart has the LG portable air conditioner on sale in two output options: The

, which is suitable for a space of up to 200 square feet, rings in at $299 ($40 off), while the more powerful

(good for up to 300 square feet) is on sale for $349 with the same discount.

air conditioner deals

TCL is another brand whose budget-friendly 4K TVs you might be familiar with, but this company also has some nice window-mounted air conditioner units to help you stay cool (maybe even while you’re doing some streaming on your TCL Roku television). This simple, no-frills window AC has everything you need including a 24-hour timer, power-saving eco mode, eight-way louvers to circulate air more effectively, and a built-in filter with a light-up filter change reminder.

You can also program the TCL window unit to automatically start at certain settings based on ambient room temperature, and you get a sleep timer as well. The

is on sale for $156, or you can grab the

(which can cool up to 550 square feet) for $366.

air conditioner deals

For a less expensive alternative to the LG portable air conditioner, check out these ones from Midea. The EasyCool portable AC units can cool an area of between 100 and 350 square feet (depending on BTU output) and feature a dedicated dehumidifying function to remove excess moisture from the air. On top of that, you also got a handy remote control, a sleep timer, three fan speeds, and an adjustable window bracket for easy ventilation.

The Midea portable air conditioner is on sale on Amazon in four power options: 8,000 BTU, 10,000 BTU, 12,000 BTU, and 14,000 BTU. These are all discounted at the moment and range in price from $254 to $323, saving you as much as $206.

air conditioner deals

Frigidaire is an iconic American refrigerator maker, but it’s in the air conditioner business now, too. This brand offers some of the better “smart” AC units on the market today and its Cool Connect lineup is designed just for the smart home crowd. The Cool Connect works like most window-mounted air conditioners, but with the added capability of Wi-Fi connectivity that lets you sync it with your home network.

Once connected, you have full control of the AC’s power, temperature settings, timers, fan speeds, and operational modes right from your smartphone. The Frigidaire Cool Connect Wi-Fi air conditioner starts at $350 for the

, $385 for the

, and $449 for the

.

How to Choose an Air Conditioner

The most important factor in deciding what sort of air conditioner is right for you is the size of the space you’re looking to cool down. Is it a single room, or a larger space like an apartment or a floor of a home? No window or portable AC unit is going to cool down an entire house by itself, but one with a higher BTU output will keep a larger room or floor comfortable and will also work more quickly in smaller spaces — but it’ll naturally consume more power to do it, which means a higher energy bill.

Air conditioner power is measured in BTUs, or British Thermal Units, and most consumer-grade models run the gamut from anywhere between 5,000 and 25,000 BTU. BTUs essentially refers to how much heat can be moved around, as an air conditioner is basically “pushing” heat away from your living space with cold air. You’ll see various claims about square footage cooling from different AC manufacturers, but it’s easier to use this calculator to find out how much BTUs you really need for whatever area you want to cool (given that you know the square footage).

Another thing to consider is whether you want a portable or window-mounted air conditioner. Remember that even portable units need a window for exhaust and so will need to be placed near one. Window-mounted air conditioners are also more efficient, but they’re semi-permanent, so a portable model should only be on your radar if you know it’s something you’ll be moving around or uninstalling and putting into storage when you don’t need it (such as during winter).

Looking for more great stuff? Find tech deals, post-Prime day sales, and much more on our curated deals page.

We strive to help our readers find the best deals on quality products and services, and we choose what we cover carefully and independently. The prices, details, and availability of the products and deals in this post may be subject to change at anytime. Be sure to check that they are still in effect before making a purchase.

Digital Trends may earn commission on products purchased through our links, which supports the work we do for our readers.

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